Help fixing a hosed NTFS

June 19, 2006 5:00 PM

Big help needed, Windows corrupted most of my NTFS disk...

Win2k, Tyan 2885, two HDDs, C: and E: (which is actually ARAID1000 mirror.. and I wish I had...) I did ALL my operations off C: since E: has important data on it after all.


I uninstalled the AMD Driver Pack in an attempt to get the onboard audio to work, during the boot, Windows then claims E: is dirty and needs CHKDSK. It did _something_ for over an hour, thanks!

Anyway, at the end of it all, E: was completely re-indexed. That is to say all Directories and Files appear to be there, no files are missing, but their data-blocks are messed up. With .JPGs sometimes the image is good, sometimes half one, and half another, but most often just corrupt.

CHKDSK again finds no issues.

Any hope at all, is there some software that can try to reindex the data blocks correctly? Any insight at all? As a giant puzzle should I hand assemble files ?:)

posted by lundman to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I've had good data recovery experiences using Stellar Phoenix.
posted by trinity8-director at 5:14 PM on June 19, 2006

Before you go shelling out the big bucks on a recovery program (all the demos are just going to show you the files you could recover, but you already can see that), try booting into Knoppix, and see if you can access and copy them out there.

I don't know how well it's going to work with your particular brand of screwed hard drive, but just last week I used it to get the data off of a disk that crashed windows every time it tried to mount. I wasn't able to get the latest Knoppix to boot (5.X), but the 4.X cd version booted right up for me, detected my SATA drives, etc.
posted by cosmonaught at 5:39 PM on June 19, 2006

I scanned the HDD for deleted files, but it has not deleted any files that aren't supposed to be deleted. It has just jumbled up the order of data blocks for existing files.

Scanning the FAQ on phoenix it did not mention anything about corruption, but I can give it a try.
posted by lundman at 6:09 PM on June 19, 2006

If you're going to play with recovery, get a disk cloning utility, like ghost, and copy the drive off, then run the recovery tool.

That way, you'll get more than one chance. "Hmm. Maybe this switch is the one I need. Wow, that's even worse. Restore drive from clone, try again."

Note for the future that this is exactly why mirrored drives aren't a backup. If something goes wrong with the software on mirrored drives, you end up with two identical unreadable drives.
posted by eriko at 6:40 PM on June 19, 2006

Yeah, NOW I have the mirror HDD pulled out, so I can play with the primary, and re-clone to retry.

The mirror was in case of hardware failure. I did not expect windows to trash everything without real cause to do so.
posted by lundman at 7:01 PM on June 19, 2006

Ahhh... ok when I uninstalled the AMD drivers, it also removed EnableBigLba registry items you must have on in Windows for LBA48 to work.

Turned it on, rebooted and let CHKDSK have its way with my HDD again, and things are much better.

Infact, not been able to find anything corrupt yet (touch wood).
posted by lundman at 8:04 PM on June 19, 2006