Recovering Windows Vista partition when the MBR is damaged

Many times when you start your Windows Vista system, you may have encountered booting problems. These situations, sometimes, are caused due to corruption in the MBR(Master Boot Record), which is the area that stores the information of the active partition. So, when the MBR is damaged the system becomes inaccessible and the data is left insecure. There are various methods including using the Bootrec.exe tool that can be used to resolve this situation. However, if that does not work then you should use a third-party partition recovery software to recover partition.

Let us take an example in which you are starting your Windows Vista system but it fails to boot. It is freezing at a black screen suggesting that the MBR of the active partition is corrupt. You run the Startup Repair to repair the MBR, but it does not show any problems with the partition.

Cause:
One of the most prominent cause of such situation is that you may have left a removable drive such as pen drive in the system. Your computer interprets it as a system partition when the system is started. That is why, when the Startup Repair tool is run, it scans the pen drive instead of the system and, hence, does not find any MBR-related errors.

Resolution:
To recover from such situations, you need to perform the following steps:
First of all, remove the pen drive if it is there in the system.
Insert the Windows Vista Setup DVD in the DVD ROM after setting the BIOS to start with the DVD.
Start the system.
Press the 'Spacebar' or any other key when you are prompted to do so.
Set various system options such as currency, system date and time, language, input method, etc.
Click Next.
Click the 'Repair your computer' option.
Select the operating system that is to be repaired.
Click Next.
Click Command Prompt in the System Recovery Options dialog box.
In the Command Prompt, type 'Bootrec.exe' and press the 'Enter' key.
The Bootrec.exe tool will repair the MBR.
Restart the system to find it working fine.

If the problem is still not addressed even after using these aforementioned steps, then you need to take desperate measures to counter it. One of such measures is using a third-party partition recovery software to recover partition. These highly sophisticated recovery tools ensure that the partition recovery is safe and sound as these use non-destructive scanning algorithms.

The best data recovery tool in its field is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery that works efficiently to recover partitions from all instances of data loss. With the ability to recover more than 185 different file types, this Windows data recovery software works on FAT, NTFS, and exFAT file systems. This partition recovery software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.