Quote Originally Posted by michaelmaxim
I think it's reading the SATA disk because it sees that single text file that is on it from the /FIXMBR command I ran when I had the Windows Recovery Console.
I just can't quite figure out what this is saying. /FIXMBR should not write any text file to anywhere on the disk, what it is intended to do is to replace the boot code part of the MBR with plain vanilla Microsoft boot code (which would, for example, remove grub or other third party boot loaders if they have been installed, or just plain replace the boot code if for some reason it's not there or corrupt. It should not change, replace or "fix" the partition table, which is the last 64 bytes of sector zero track zero cylinder zero, aka the MBR. Can you tell us more about this text file? It almost sounds like the drive has been directly written to, as would be a floppy or a USB flash drive, rather than a properly partitioned hard drive. If that's the case then gpart or testdisk will be essential to rebuild the partition table. The /fixmbr option would also restore the boot code, but I would expect that should make any text file on an unpartitioned hard drive vanish. You shouldn't need to run /fixmbr to read the disk with Knoppix, but you might need it in eventually recovering the disk for Windows use. The good news is that since modern hard drives contain so much space on cylinder zero, if the text file is reasonably small, you may not have damaged any or much data on the FAT partition if something did write to cylinder zero as if the disk wasn't partitioned. I'm at a loss on how that would have happened though, unless someone forced a Linux system to mount sda rather than sda1 and then wrote to it or formatted it.