Corrupt Master File Table?

ukSleek

ukSleek

ukSleek

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Joined
29 Mar 2007
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Location
England,BUCKS
Hi i could do with some advice and help please..

Just yesterday i rebooted my system only to find windows was going to do a hard drive scan (or whatever its called) only to find it didn't even get passed stage one and came up with the message "corrupt master file table" and aborted the scan.

I can't even access the drive in windows when its booted up? (i use it as a media disc and it's an hitachi drive PATA drive.

Regard's.
 
do you have an orignal windows disc?

If not grab a copy of Hiren or something simialr and boot to the recovery console and fur the following commands

chdsk <drive letter>: /r

fixboot

fixbmr
 
I managed to type in fixboot and it repaird it but when i try and type in fixbmr it don't seem to work?

BTW i had to type in CHKDSK and not chdsk,and the commands after like<D>:/r came up with unregognised command for some reason?

EDIT: fixbmr i think should have been fixmbr...anyway it repaired it so it said but i still can't access the drive in windows? :(
 
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The more you mess about the less chance you have of getting your DATA back.

I had a HDD appearing as RAW after a Mobo fire and the software I linked to got ALL my DATA back.
 
Sorry folks, but while there's some good advice in this thread, there's also some very bad advice.

fixmbr won't do jack on a non-boot drive. Its whole purpose is to make a drive bootable, which in this case is irrelevant. Even on a boot drive it won't touch the MFT inside a partition, which is the problem here.

If you want to recover data from a disk that appears to be going bad, the last things you should do are (a) write data to the disk, and (b) stress the disk out further with hardware tests.

Firstly, I'd suggest trying a different cable or a different PC if either are available. File recovery options, as mentioned above, would be next on the list.

Once you're done with any recovery, then it's time to dig out the drive diagnostics tools.
 
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The advice I gave regarding fixboot, fixmbr and chkdsk are the usual ones I run when data does not appear on a drive. I find that most of the time these commands will work to allow the drive to appear in windows and then use 3rd party to get missing data back. I have seen hundreds of machines come through the workshop with problems on boot and found that on 90%+ of the time these commands will work. As the OP was requesting help I made the assumtion that he/she did not have the required knowledge to run data recovery in a non windows enviroment using applications like GetDataBack etc.

I agree that as a rule your should not do anything to a drive that you a trying to recover data from but I beleived that the drive was simply suffering from MFT errors or Volume Bitmap Errors.

Just trying to help.

Out of curiosity did anything work ?
 
Thank's to all for the advice..

@Swordfish..the drive is visible in windows but it shows up now as RAW..and i can't access the drive..it turns out i had made a backup of the drive with Genie Pro ages ago (thank ****!) so i restored all the data onto a desktop hard drive.

What i was asking in fact was is the drive knackered or is there a way of getting it back online?

regard's.
 
I've had this from time to time and chkdsk will not work on drives marked as raw, and then I use GetDataBack to recover the files. At least you have a backup. I back up all my drives using Acronis and store them on a separate 2.5" laptop drive in a caddy. The hassle of making the backup is nothing compared to the hassle of losing your data.
 
Usually if MBR is knackered either the drive is fit for the skip, or you have to do low level maintence on the drive (manu. diagnostics/tools)
 
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