Corrupt master file table. WD Black

jwink86

jwink86

jwink86

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Joined
8 Jan 2013
Posts
99
Location
Birmingham
Hi All,

I'm looking for some advice with regards to a recent issue I have had.

Last weekend I downloaded a new game from Steam, done in exactly the same was as normal. Downloaded, installed and played... all good so far.

Came to use my pc again on the Sunday and could not get this to boot. Kept wanting to run chkdisk on one of my HDD's which after a few minutes always failed. Error message was
"Corrupt master file table. Windows will attempt to recover master file table from disk.
Windows cannot recover master file table. CHKDSK aborted."

What i've tried
As windows recognizes the disk it keeps asking me if I want to format this whenever its plugged in, which I thought was a good sign but if possible I wanted to recover the data first.

I've tried running chkdsk from cmd line, MS Dart and a Bart PE Disk. All produced similar errors. "File structure is corrupt and unreadable" or along those sort of lines.
I've ran various different HDD diagnostics including the WD ones which confirm the drive itself is OK.

I ran a couple of data recovery programs, GetDataBack for NTFS and RestorerPro2000 which after many hours of looking like they were doing something produced no results as they were unable to read the table on the disk.

So my question is has anybody ever had this issue before and do they have any other suggestions before I re-partition and start again?

Thanks in advance.
 
Unfortunately not. Probably should have mentioned this is my 2nd drive with data/programs on it.

I did try running the Windows repair but it would not pick up either drive, I was assuming it wouldn't pick up the 1st drive as this is a SSD and set to AHCI in the Bios? (maybe needed drivers?) Also believed that it wouldn't pick up the 2nd drive as this has no OS installed?
 
Yeah, it is unable to read the partition data it seems. It shows up and knows its a 1TB but just keeps wanting to format it.
 
I've had this recently on my 1tb sammy (slave data drive had had most of the stuff backed up about a month prior to the corruption). Tried all sorts and never had a resolution. I orignally thought the HDD was failing but found that this was not the case and is just the corrupted MFT and there doesn't seem to be a fix without full clean out.
The data is still on the disk but is raw data.

I used chkdsk but was no use. Then tried testdisk amongst other options. Testdisk tried to repair the corrupted MFT but the mirror was also corrupted. Ran the data recovery tool which took hours (day or so) to retrieve data but it was not in an organised form, not even the file names. There is another tool I used which showed everything in original structure but it was a paid for tool which I didn't try. I might purchase that as it looks pretty good and was about £15 from what I recall.

I would also like to know if anyone has encountered this and has a solution with a positive result?
 
Yes, testdisk was another program that I tried as this is the only program I could find that seemed to attempt a fix a MFT but no luck either. I'm almost committed to running a DBAN on it and starting again. Luckily i've got a backup from a couple of months ago so not much will be lost. Ill have to download my Steam library again though!
 
ED209 said:
was it this site you tried for the data recovery software?

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
Click to expand...


Not seen this one before. Had a dig around as I forgot which one it was on the top of my head, but then saw the site and it was Active@ File Recovery.

jwink86 said:
Yes, testdisk was another program that I tried as this is the only program I could find that seemed to attempt a fix a MFT but no luck either. I'm almost committed to running a DBAN on it and starting again. Luckily i've got a backup from a couple of months ago so not much will be lost. Ill have to download my Steam library again though!
Click to expand...

It was also PhotoRec which I used to recover files but as I mentioned it had no structure and basically what was found was renamed into a logical sequence set by the application. If you are content with your backups then a fresh start might save the hassle (if you can even call it that).
 
Cheers megatron, tested this out today which seemed to pick up the partitions (even some I didn't know it had!) but was unable to recover any data unfortunately. Thanks for the tips guys, I'm gonna flatten it and start again GRRR!
 
I thought it may be able to reconstruct the partitions. Is the drive usable? Would you trust your data with it?
 
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