FixBoot Command changing Windows Partition from NTFS to FAT

At times when you start your computer, it may not start successfully due to particular boot up process related issues. When you use fixboot command to solve the boot issues, it might change your file system from NTFS to FAT and might make your entire hard drive partitions and data inaccessible. Such behavior causes partition loss and you need to opt for partition recovery solutions to recover the inaccessible or lost data. In a practical scenario, when you try booting your Windows XP Professional computer, the process might halt with the following error message:

We apologize for the inconvenience, but windows did not start successfully.”

With this error message, Windows prompts you to boot the system in Normal mode, Safe Mode with Command Prompt and Safe Mode with Networking. When you attach the affected hard drive to another system as a slave, which had Windows installed, the system will assign drive letter to the hard drive. But when you try to access the drive, Windows gives you an error message:

The disk is not formatted; do you wish to format it now?”

After this error message, when you attach the hard drive with other PC and try to install new operating system using “Leave the current file system intact (No Changes)” option, the process fails because the partition is listed as:

Partition 1 (Unknown)”

After this behavior, when you use Recovery Console and use CHKDSK command to detect and fix file system problems, you might encounter the following error message:

The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.”

When you try fixboot command to resolve the boot issue, it comes up with the following message:

  • FixBoot is attempting to detect the file system type.
  • The boot sector is corrupt
  • FixBoot is checking the file system type
  • The partition is using the FAT file system
  • FixBoot is writing a new boot sector
  • The new boot sector was successfully written

After this process, the system boots properly but your NTFS partitions become FAT 32 and data stored on them becomes inaccessible. All you can do to recover data is use partition recovery software and scan the physical drive to recover all NTFS partition. These recovery software are specifically designed to scan the entire hard drive thoroughly and achieve quick and proficient data recovery.