Never use Windows FixBoot!

I recently had a slave IDE ntfs drive parition go alittle south where Windows XP recognized the entire drive but saw it as Raw formatted partition.  Unfortunately, I did not realize until it was too late that fixBoot from XP recovery console creates a FAT12 Boot partition.  So now, I hosed up a perfectly good hard drive with 70 GB of family photos. 

Looking through my   software collection, I had an old copy spinrite 3.1 that had helped me recover files from a FAT32 drive 5 years ago.  I purchased and downloaded Spinrite 6.0 from Home of Gibson Research Corporation .  Spinrite failed to recognize my ~190 GB IDE drive and saw it as an oversided 128 GB drive.  Too nervous to proceed, I downloaded a demo copy of Partition Table Doctor from ptdd.com.  It saw the drive correctly as a 190 GB NTFS drive with a corrupted boot sector.  but of course the demo version would not fix the problem, had to purchase the full version.

But when I followed the link to purchase it, I found it was no longer being sold.

Partition Table Doctor Personal Edition	Single License	End of Marketing EASEUS aims to offer more professional data recovery software Data Recovery Wizard other than Partition Table Doctor now!
Partition Table Doctor Unlimited Edition	Unlimited License
Partition Recovery For Windows (Partition Table Doctor Windows version)	Single License
Partition Recovery Bootable CD (Partition Table Doctor DOS version)	Single License

Rats!  But I discovered that is was bundled and sold here:

Personal Data Recovery Package

Contains Partition Table Doctor and Data Recovery Wizard to recover data from disaster suffering partition or disk. The final tools for protecting your data from being lost. Single License.

Buy Now
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It cost me $90 instead of just $45 but the software did work!  and I did get a refund for spinrite 6.0.

And of course, I immediately backed up my 70 Gbs of photos with only losing 3-4 photos.

 

So, don't use FixBoot!