Wiped out MBR - Passport wdbbep0010bbk-01

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

Hi,

First time posting on the Community and thank you for any suggestions…

I made a backup of Win7 from an HP G72 laptop to my Passport Drive using “Odin”.   At a point of hard disk replacement in the HP, I used Hiren’s BootCD to allow the XP PE environment to execute Odin from the passport to effect the restore.

The restore was a full backup image in chunk mode, (only actual data written + MBR of entire disk), in this case three partitions standard on the HP were image backed up.

When I started up the HP with the new Hard Disk I overlooked the fact that Passport USB was assigned C: as it’s drive ID and the backups were targeted to C:.  No format of new HD had been done at this point.

When I committed the restore, Odin inadvertently allowed the C drive passport as source to become the destination from the assigned backup image and hence the restore overwrote the MBR on Passport and process died once the MBR was gone.  I was a bit mortified Odin didn’t catch my goof in overlooking the drive assignments, but none the less I believe the entire data may still exist on passport or at least hopefully the HP backup image might.

Can anyone suggest if there is a hidden MBR backup on the Passport I might use to restore the Passport’s original MBR or is there a otherwise to access the rarw files located on the Passport which now believes the three partitions written are “raw” mode, when viewed from chkdsk.

This was the first and only backup on this machine which means I’ve lost the original windows install and recovery data as well if I cannot recover it, as the laptop comes with no OS disk, except the original drive image.

All help greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Urban

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Welcome to the Community.

Due to the delicate nature of this particular case I’d recommend contacting a dedicated / professional data recovery service company and avoid hard drive use in the meanwhile in order to avoid further risking the data within your hard drive.

http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?wdc_lang=en

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This is a follow up for the benefit of those who might make a similar mistake.

The cause of the issue was mis-identification of the source and target drives in restoring a backup from Odin Open Source backup software; a somewhat immature development that never quite got fully embellished.  It is a 32 bit gui application which permitted VCC snapshotting of running windows and stored a common MBR and individual partitions in raw .img format.

When the wrong selections were made in configuring a restore, I inadvertently told Odin to restore the source restore images onto the source drive as target, which immediately overwrote the source drive’s MBR destroying any further process as a recursive epic fail, ultimately leaving the core images intact on the source, but damaged MBR.

The cause of the need to restore turns out was a failed 4GB ram chip on the target machine which had resulted in corrupt MBR and data indexes on its hard drive.  Each of many BSOD events caused data corruption on the drive as drive caching was in use, making it appear the drive or possibly drive controller were at fault.  The corruption was bad enough that Chkdsk actually did more damage than good by misdirection of the index rebuild during chkdsk /F.

I ended up using Hiren’s boot cd, a 32 bit Win XP PE (pre-install environment) to copy the raw backup data from the source drive to a safe network location, after which I scrubbed both the source and target drives and reconditioned them ready for operation, done with drive caching off to protect from further corruption.  The faulty RAM was eventually replaced.

Final chkdsk confirmations on both drives confirmed the drives were ready for use.  The source disk was re-loaded with the preserved target restore images and a proper restore was then finally completed without any significant loss of data.

Best I can say when you seldom ever do restores is RTFM, before you use any software to do a specialized task and always use two separate backup plans to protect from an unforeseen failure in one of those methods.

In closing WD support made a reasonable effort above and beyond to assist in duplicating the process but did not understand to first cause the recursive fail and otherwise found the restore process worked on their passport system properly.  I was able to complete the restore without further help, but to say WD was remarkably prepared to help in any way they could had I not already determined a path to a solution. 

Many thanks to Trancer and WD support.  I continue to use WD drives exclusively for more than 10 years running, with more than 30 of them in service, having yet to see any drive failure that wasn’t well beyond the drive’s anticipated lifespan.

Urban

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Ahh the old standby, faulty ram. Bad ram is a nasty insidious problem with both creating and restoring backups.