recover data from broken ntfs partition
 

Hello.

Sorry for offtop, but your forums are helpful and you might know.

My boss uses Windows.
The filesystem got corrupted, as it does once in a while.
I ran chkdsk on it. It failed. I ran fixboot.
It wrote a vfat16 boot sector over an ntfs partition.
I don't care about recovering the system as much (I can clone it from a clean installation from the network) as just getting one file from it.
I used SystemRescueCD in the past, but I am not sure what to do now.

So, what should I do?
Thank you.

Can system rescuecd work or what?
There's others too-

SystemRescueCD works, yes.
But if I mount it as vfat, I don't get to read any data.
And if I mount it as ntfs, I don't get to read any data.
I need to find a way to regenerate the partition table.

Load a Linux Live distro (such as knoppix) onto the system. You then should be able to read the hard drive and extract what you need. If you cannot, then the partition table is fouled up and you will have to post back so I (or someone else) can talk you through the repair procedure.