Since yesterday I have a "small" problem with my harddisk.

I have a 20 GB-Disk, on which I have installed a Windows ME as well as a Linux (Knoppix-distribution). Until yesterday, everything worked fine. Today, it's impossible to boot Linux and when booting Windows, just the 2,5 GB Windows-Partition is available, the 12 GB Data-Partition is not accessible.

Same problem, when booting Linux or Windows from CD.

Using Ranish Partition Manager indicates me some problems with most of my partitions.

Some exaples of the errors:

"Boot sector doesn't have valid information"

"Invalid layout of extended partition chain. Boot sector doesn't have valid information"

"Partition addresses are out of range. Invalid layout of extended partition chain"

The error appeared without any explication for me. Yesterday I switched the computer off, today, the harddisk has the mentioned problems.

Does anybody know, how I can restore the boot sector without loosing any data? fdisk /mbr is not the solution. I can still boot Windows, but the partition with all data is not available. It would be great if anybody could help me...

Thank you in advance

Sven

Windows 2000, when the recovery-console is installed, has a file called "bootsect.dat" in its C:\CMDCONS directory.
I don't know ME, but maybe it has something similar?

It would help to know exactly how did you break your partition table.. If the first partition shows up OK, there is a chance that you can make your extended partitions readable by fiddling with the values in the partition table (using Ranish PM). Perhaps some advanced recovery software can do this also, I have only used the manual method once.