Asus F3J boots from recovery partition

[MichaelFitz]

When booting one our laptops, it boots up to C drive which turned out to be the recovery partition.
Running ERD found the windows partition.
Does anyone know how the active partition could of been changed inadvertantly?
Anyone seen this before?
System was running XP SP3.

[MichaelFitz]

I should add that using symantect recovery 2010, managed to change the active partition so that it boots to the domain ok now. I have run malwarebytes just in case. I really just want to know how it could of happened.

[jak0b]

Hi Michael

The difference on an active and an inactive partition on a hard drive is only a few bits on the platter.
All hdd's are expected to make such an error, on very rare occasions. I think the common number is about 1 time in 10^15 read attempts, so it might just have been a freak accident.

But I suggest that you run a full diagnostic with surface scan on that particular drive, as it might also be a bad disk.
If you happen to find any other errors in the scan, I suggest you get a replacement from the dealer, before you loose any important data. :)

[MichaelFitz]

Hi Michael

The difference on an active and an inactive partition on a hard drive is only a few bits on the platter. All hdd's are expected to make such an error, on very rare occasions. I think the common number is about 1 time in 10^15 read attempts, so it might just have been a freak accident.

But I suggest that you run a full diagnostic with surface scan on that particular drive, as it might also be a bad disk. If you happen to find any other errors in the scan, I suggest you get a replacement from the dealer, before you loose any important data. :)

Thanks for the suggestions jakob

I've run full diagnostics on the HDD. No errors.

If it had happened just the once I would agree with you but as it kept happening I believe it was intentional. I have backed up all the data and am reinstalling the SOE.

Thanks for the advice