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I was trying to write a ramdisk image to my sdcard but unfortunately I wrote the image to my hard disk instead. The size of the ramdisk image is about 7M and it was written to the first sections of my hard disk drive. After that my laptop won't boot anymore. How can I possibly recover my hard disk? My laptop is Dell Vostro 1400. Please please help me!

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 28 '11 at 20:35

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This is off topic, but if you ask it somewhere else, they're probably going to need to know the OS that is on the laptop and the format that the drive is... the start of the hard drive as the MBR, along with the partition table. It'll need reconstructed to match the drive configuration. I think you've then got the drive allocation table at the start of the partition, you'll have a lost a lot of that, including the pointer to the OS boot loader (probably)... that'll need rebuilt... I'd recommend looking for some existing recovery software to do it for you... –  forsvarir Aug 5 '11 at 7:30
Thank you! My OS is Windows XP SP3 with a 120G ATA hard disk . All I need is my data on D:\ back.... –  shi kui Aug 5 '11 at 7:40
If all the stuff you want is on the D drive, then you might get lucky... It's likely that the D drive is the second partition on the drive, so the disk allocation table may be intack. If so you might just need to rebuild the partition table and boot from CD to get it up and running... superuser.stackexchange.com may be able to recommend an approach for rebuilding the partition table (you need to make sure that any partitions written to the table aren't formatted by the software, or it will erase the allocation table). –  forsvarir Aug 5 '11 at 7:55
Yeah thanks again. Hopefully some hard-drive recovery tools will work it out. –  shi kui Aug 5 '11 at 8:06
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