$CEO at $dayjob brought his daughter’s HP desktop in to work today. Apparently it just stopped working (and has been knocked off of the table at least once) one day. So, we boot the machine, and there’s nothing. No BIOS, no POST, no beeps, no boot. We scratch our heads (me and my boss), and wonder if the video card is fried – at one point in PC history, if you yanked the video card, some motherboards wouldn’t even try to POST. We change out the card. Nothing. We pull out the additional media cards (wireless, sound etc). Nothing. We disconnect anything that might be a power load other than the primary hard drive and CPU fan. Nothing.

Round two – it’s taken a fall, so we reseat the RAM. Presto, it beeps and tries to boot! No bootable device media found. Try the other hard drive. No bootable device media found. Plug in my oh-so-handy Kubuntu memory stick. Boots!

So the BIOS is able to find bootloader instructions. We let Kubuntu boot all the way, and I interrogate the first hard drive with fdisk -l /dev/sda. No partition table. Well, that’d be why the BIOS couldn’t find a bootable device. Now, in the past, when I’ve encountered this, I just say to heck with it and re-install the OS – there weren’t any free tools that could recover the partition table.

However, in the computer field, things are constantly changing. A bit of searching with Google, and I found a tool called TestDisk, supplied by cgsecurity.org. In several words, it’s a partition table management tool, including recovery of lost partitions, that runs under most operating systems. Told it the heads value for the drive in question, told it to analyse the drive, and 30 seconds later I had a recovered partition table. Two minutes later I was staring at a Windows XP boot logo.

The $CEO is happy.