Unbootable Drive on ThinkPad

[bernard]

I have IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad R52 and I ran Defraggler on its drive last night. It all seemed to go fine until I came to reboot the machine and then it would not boot. I got messages which basically said there was no operating system on the drive - the boot sequnece went through the various options to try and find a bootable device and eventually stopped. I guess Defraggler somehow messed up the boot records. I say this because it happened on a second drive in the same circumstances. If I accessed the drives through a USB cable on another machine I could see that all the data was still there and accessible through normal Windows operations - Explorer had no trouble accessing it. Fortunately I was able to recover the drives since I had the IBM/Lenovo Rescue and Recovery CDs plus a backup of my data. The drives in this machine and a variety of other ThinkPads seem to be a bit different from some other drives in that IBM/Lenovo put a hidden partition on the drive to hold the backup copy of Windows - this partition does not normally show up in any normal application - you can see it is there in the Admin tools though. It is used as an alternative boot device for recovering the system if things go wrong (however in this case it was not possible to use it - as well as not being possible to use the normal operating system partition, hence I had to use the last resort backup of CDs). Furthermore the drives in these ThinkPads have special drive firmware which supports access to the hidden partition. Anyway to cut a long story short it seems there is a bug here somewhere which may just happen with these machines or it may be relevant whenever there are multiple boot partitions on a drive. In the end I had to do a complete re-format of the drive to get it back into a state from which Rescue and Recovery would work - without this Rescue and Recovery failed with a cryptic 'internal error' - don't you just love those error messages!

[Guest MrRon]

Defraggler uses the standard Windows Defrag APIs to rearrange the files, plus we have extra guards in place to make sure certain files are not moved. We will look into this issue.

 

MrRon

[bernard]

Thanks MrRon, I would have just put it down to one of those things if it had happened just once, but it happened on 2 drives from different manufacturers, one an 80 GB drive and one 60 GB. I defragged them both on the same machine and without rebooting it in between. I did tick the option to defrag all the files that had been identified as needing a defrag and there were no error messages from either run. In fact everyything looked perfect until I tried to reboot each drive and then the blood drained from me as realisation dawned - I accept that I should have been a bit more cautious but given my excellent experience with CCleaner over the years I wasn't expecting any issues defragging individual files. If I remember correctly some of the file names that came up were system files names like System Information - I can't remember them exactly but they didn't look like file names that you normally see. I have reformatted one of the drives (the 80GB one) and its now running the system I'm writing this from but the other drive is still in the state it was left in - accessible, but non-bootable. If you have some tool that will extract the boot records for you to look at you're more than welcome to contact me via my email and I'll run the tool for you and send you the output if it will help you.