Step 2: Data Recovery through DC to Rebuild MBR using ShadowDisk function (SD Data Recovery Tools case study)

By finishing the above operations carried out by Phase 1 data recovery tools - HD Doctor, the disk could be detected by the computer, but the operation system can't work. This is very likely caused by corrupted MBR.

A master boot record (MBR), or partition sector, is the 512-byte boot sector that is the first sector ("LBA Sector 0") of a partitioned data storage device such as a hard disk. It is used as boot the operation system, record the partition table and identifying individual disk media.

If the MBR broken, we usually use data recovery software to scan the partitions and files to retrieve data, but if there are bad sectors on the disk, the scan may hang. We also could search the EMBR and modify the MBR manually, but if the MBR was damaged by bad sector (like the case of this example), this method still can't work by using routine data recovery tools.

In this case, we will show you another method to solve this kind of problem by using SD Phase 2 data recovery tools - Data Compass with the ShadowDisk function. It's a very quickly (needn't scan the files or partition) and safe (needn't modify data on the patient drive) method.

When we connect the drive with data recovery tools DC, we can see the drive status is ready:

But if we want to access to the MBR sector using the Sector View function of this data recovery tools, we got error info:

As the above picture, all the data show "4040" can't be accessed, then we turn to 63 DBR sector using the data recovery tools:

Got the same result, seems in the front of this disk, so many bad sectors are there! Try to access the other sectors using the data recovery tools:

Fortunately, most of the user data still could be accessed.

In this condition, we could use the SD Phase 3 data recovery tools DCEXP to scan the partition or the files, but if there are so many bad sectors, the scan may cost too much time, but we just need a few files on this disk! So in this case, we use another way, by using the ShadowDisk function of the SD Phase 2 data recovery tools, to "fix" the MBR and retrieve data very quickly.