From time to time, generally because of virus infection and improper system shutdown like situations, FAT file system boot sector of your Windows computer might get damaged. If the partition containing operating system files or it is an active primary partition, it could prevent the computer system from booting. Otherwise, this might just prevent the access of data on the hard drive partition.
Generally when you suspect hard drive corruption and partition loss situations, you need to use commercial Partition Recovery tools, but in some situations complete knowledge of boot sector might prove useful.
The file system boot sector of a partition is the first physical sector. The logical partition may be either the primary partition or a logical drive in extended partition, or the combination of one or more partitions. The file system boot sector is different from the Master Boot Record and contains a partition table that describes layout for the logical partitions on hard drive. The file system boot sector will be the first sector of every partition in Windows operating system.
Boot Process
Boot process of Windows computers directly use the file system boot sector to execute instructions. Initial boot procedure could be summarized as underwritten:
POST (Power On Self Test) is initiated by CPU and BIOS.
BIOS decide which device is used as boot device.
BIOS loads first sector from boot device in memory and then transfers CPU execution to start of memory address.
MBR code loads boot sector referenced by partition table for active primary partition in memory and then transfers CPU execution to the beginning.
Till this point, boot process is complete independent of what OS is being loaded and how disk is formatted. From here, file systems and the operating system play a part.
When you suspect that the FAT boot sector is damaged, you could check whether the values in the fields make sense. You can see text strings there and can change as per the situation. But in case if you can’t resolve the problem with general troubleshooting, it become essential to go for Partition Recovery Software.
These are powerful and advanced third party applications, which allow you to carry out smooth Partition Recovery in most of the cases. High-end scanning algorithms are use by these Partition Recovery Software to achieve absolute and successful recovery.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most effective and powerful application to handle all sorts of partition loss situations. It recovers FAT32, VFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file system partitions. This easy to use application is designed for Microsoft Windows 7 RC1, Vista, 2003, XP and 2000.