Windows XP NTFS MFT Corruption

Skiddley

Skiddley

Skiddley

Soldato
Joined
1 Aug 2003
Posts
3,797
Location
Cheshire
This happended last night, 100gig partition on a WD2500JD lost, chkdsk doesn't want to know saying that the partition is unrecoverable. Can't mount the partition when I put it in another machine, if I try and reinstall windows it reckons the partition is 100% empty and asks me to format (yea..right!) :(

Strangly, when I try to boot XP from it, i get the loading screen, then it resets. Using Safe mode shows a load of drivers being loaded from system32/ then it resets...so presumably it can see some fo the file system still.

Disk was manafactured March 1st 2004, had since new, was from OcUK.

There is a great deal of work on this disk, lots of source code and all of my CCIP & CCIE study material/notes that unbeliveably was about to be backed up.

Anyone have any experience recovering from corrupted MFTs?

Thanks.
Skidd
 
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I think you should be able to recover a lot of data with a third party program. The data is physically there, the HDU just can't 'see' it. I'm sure some people will recommend a good program (this has happened to a number on these forums) but off-hand I don't know any. Hang in there, help should be on its way :).
 
YAY. Spoke to the IT guy at work and he recommended a little dos tool called FindNTFS. By putting the disk into another maching and using this tool, I was able to recover >80gb of material, the rest was just crap...windows etc.

Success!

I've run a load of hardware diagnosis tools and the disk looks fine. Had a mare getting windows to install, I originally quick formatted drive c (the 1st partition), and left drive d (extended partition) alon as it looked ok. Big mistake. It wasn't and windows kept getting currupt as it was using d for the swap file.

Finally gone back to basics, deleted all partitions, recreated, full low-level format and I'm back speaking to you from a fresh XP install...and a stack of DVDs with all of my work backed up :D

Phew!

BTW: SMART tells me that the total disk uptime is 3930Hours, with 634 power cycles! Yikes! I need to get out more!!
 
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