Restoring master boot record by using tool named HDHacker
The most basic information that is to be noted is that for a PC to get access to a drive, it requires to read through various structures of the disk such as boot sector, master boot sector (MBR), partition table and much more. But we do not care for these unless our drive becomes totally unreadable. It is then we decide to know and learn about these things.
HDHacker is considered to be one of the well known that is used to restore master boot record of the drive, boot sector or other sectors. It is a tiny tool that performs these functions. It is considered to be dangerous as if any chance you choose wrong sector or drive, it could thrash your system. But sometimes it could be help in disguise too.
The program runs on a single 112 KB which runs on Windows NT. You may find it difficult to find old system that does not depend on .Net or Java.
Once HDHacker is launched, you can select a drive which is either physical, removable or fixed. Then you need to choose a sector and the list of sectors that is to be read.
Click on Read Sector and HDHacker will read and display the sectors from the chosen ones. Most of them are binary details are meaningless, but they could also be useful information. If the boot sector does start with extension .RNTFS, then you can be sure it is a NTFS drive. For FAT disks, it should have FAT16 or FAT32 as the first line.
There are also other ways to save file to sectors, reload or write them later. These helps to have back up for structures and restore them even if your system drive has been corrupt. If so, you will not be able to boot Windows that is used to run HDHacker. You need to be careful that a small error could make the drive unreadable.