MBR, the acronym stands for Master Boot record

It uniquely identifies the individual disk media attached to the system by virtue of a 32 bit signature and hence the Windows system is able to learn the properties of the volume/disk. Due to any reason, if the MBR gets corrupted, the data in the drive becomes completely inaccessible and only through an Windows Data Recovery software, you can recover the data.

On a Sunday afternoon, while trying to start your office laptop, it took unusually longer time and eventually stuck in the middle. Furthermore, it showed the blue screen of death or a black screen with an error message. The booting process got halted at that point and all your data remained inaccessible. The possible error flashing on the screen may be as below:

'No bootable partition in table'

Cause:

Most likely, the above error can be caused due to the corruption of the Master Boot Record (MBR). Another possibility is that if by any operation, you have modified the disk MBR or your system is not getting the one it is looking for.

Another ordinary possibility is that may be the system has been set to boot from any storage media, which doesn't have any valid boot instruction set in the MBR. In simple, the system is trying to boot from a non bootable CD, DVD or a USB device.

Resolution:

Ensure that there is no CD, DVD or any other device connected to the system and moreover, check for the correct boot sequence.

If the above is alright and the error still persists, put the Windows system installation disk, and open the recovery console by pressing the key 'R' at the start-up. Then run the command 'fixmbr'.

After trying the above options, if the problem remains unresolved, then the only way left is to make a fresh installation of the operating system.

However, if you don't have any valid backup, then you have to use any windows data recovery software in order to recover your valuable data.

These Windows data recovery software are capable of recovering any lost, deleted, formatted or inaccessible data from a Windows operating system based hard drive. Moreover, the software usually have Windows look-a-like user interfaces and come with detailed instruction sets.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a popular utility that recovers any Windows data from FAT, exFAT and NTFS file system volumes under any instance of data loss. The software is compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, 2002(XP), 2000 and comes with advanced safety features like hard drive cloning, creating image of the chosen volume, save scan to resume recovery of data later on etc.