The Vista D-Cryptor application makes changes to a target disk in order to repair it. It is recommended that a clone/image of the disk be used. Bad disks will cause instability when trying to recover data and in most cases will not work anyway.
FDR BitLocker Edition can be used when damage or corruption has occurred to partitions and boot information. Although this information makes up a small part of a working disk; our experience in data recovery shows that this type of logical problem is one of the most common reasons for data loss.
Data corruption can be the result of user error or operating system errors.
Damage to a disk can be due to bad sectors which cannot be read and so all information is lost. Quite often a disk with bad sectors will need to be cloned in order to perform any data recovery procedures. This image of the bad disk will often contain empty sectors where the original disk cannot be read.
If a disk has severe corruption and/or physical problems then it is advised to seek the advice of a data recovery professional.
Identifying Problems with a Disk in Windows
If a disk appears as “Not Initialised” in the Windows Disk Management Console then the Master Boot Record is either missing completely or damaged to such an extent that Windows cannot use the Primary Partition Table contained within. In this case, you will need to follow the section entitled “Repairing Lost Master Boot Records (Sector 0)”.
If a disk has incomplete or incorrect partition information then you can simply scan for lost partitions and recreate them in an empty Primary Partition slot. If this is the case then it is still worthwhile reading through the above mentioned section and backing up the damaged Master Boot Record and making sure one or more Primary Partition slots are empty and available.
Once a disk has a working Master Boot Record with an available Primary Partition slot, follow the section entitled “Finding Lost Partitions and Restoring”. Once repaired and available, a partition can be unlocked, mounted and decrypted by following the section entitled “Unlocking a Repaired BitLocker Encrypted Partition”.
Check that your system meets the system specifications required. Then run the setup executable file and follow on-screen instructions.
FDR BitLocker Edition was developed using the Microsoft .NET framework; therefore any prerequisites will be automatically downloaded through your Internet connection and installed automatically.
If you experience any problems during installation, please see the “Fields Disk Rescue Support and Bug Reporting” section.
Repairing Lost Master Boot Records (Sector 0)
In the instance of corrupt or missing Master Boot Records, Windows will not be able to find and mount primary partitions or will mount them incorrectly. However, FDR BitLocker Edition can scan disks for missing partitions and it is possible to rebuild the Master Boot Record.
Where the Master Boot Record (MBR) is missing entirely, whether due to bad sectors or an incomplete image, the MBR from another working disk can be used and partition information changed based on scan results:
Finding Lost Partitions and Restoring
You can scan a disk for lost partitions and recreate Primary Partition records so that they can once again be accessed and, if necessary, decrypted:
Unlocking a Repaired BitLocker Encrypted Partition
Once the Master Boot Record is repaired successfully you can use the FDR BitLocker Edition application to unlock and then decrypt them: