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Dell N5010 Laptop / Seagate 640gb disk with what I assume to be Win7 home premium on it. Was donated and missing charger and battery so may not be worth investment. Computer gets past BIOS post then black screen. Can't F8. I don't know what files are on disk so don't care about files. Just want to repair FS for practice. If not I can wipe clean and use as external storage.

Removed disk and used SATA/USB adapter to connect to 2 netbooks. One Winxp and one Win7. Running chkdisk does not seem to do anything. On Win 7 starter netbook , check disk utility returns "windows cannot access this disk".There are three partitions in device manager all healthy but 2 main partitions (labeled E and F) show as RAW data. I guess small partition at beginning of drive is MBR and not given a letter.

So connected drive with same SATA/USB adapter to PCLinuxOS on another laptop running Linux testdisk. . Am following instructions here --> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step - and ran analyse, then deeper, but unsure what next.

Testdisk reports:

Disk /dev/sdb - 640 GB / 596 GiB - CHS 77826 255 63
Partition Start End Size in sectors
* FAT16 >32M 0 32 33 12 223 16 204797 [DellUtility]
D HPFS - NTFS 12 223 20 1925 27 22 30720000
D HPFS - NTFS 1925 27 22 3837 86 24 30720000
D HPFS - NTFS 1925 27 23 14673 80 63 204800000
D HPFS - NTFS 1925 27 23 77825 48 31 1219334832 [OS]
D HPFS - NTFS 2611 0 1 9728 254 63 114350670
D HPFS - NTFS 14673 81 1 19457 48 31 76852912 [ALCHEMY]

Pressing P on each entry to list files gives " can't open filesystem ...seems damaged " - AND on

Line "D HPFS - NTFS 1925 27 23 14673 80 63 204800000 " testdisk also reports:

NTFS found using backup sector!, 104 GB / 97 GiB. I can also post testdisk log if needed.



Any help appreciated.

Here is link to testdisk.log at pastebin --> http://pastebin.com/A7v0byZt

Your partition table looks ok.
Have you been able to list your files from your second and third partition after Deeper Search?
Testdisk.log indicates, that your file system from your second partition is damaged.
In case you need datarecovery software which reads data underlying in your sectors.
But you wrote, there is no necessity to recover any data but only to repair the file system to get ist usable.
Something what you can do might be a boot sector diagnose as a try to list your data or repair it.
A boot sector diagnose will work as follow;
Confirm through until you see the menu "Analyse".
Don't confirm at Analyse but Advanced.
Select your second partition.
Confirm at boot and run Rebuild BS.
If it works, try to list your data using the menu List.
If you get an error message only, indicates that your file system ist damaged.
You can have a try to use chkdsk.
If chkdsk doesn't work, you can have a try at TestDisk / Advanced / Boot and Repair MFT to fix it as described here;
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Advanced ... n_NTFS_MFT

Please let me know

Fiona

Ran Chkdsk E: /r /f and seemed to do something. took about 1 hr. chkdsk Found NTFS partition but I didn't write down messages - something to the effect that MFT and MFT backup unreadable. There was never any output indicating "fixed". Haven't used Windows in years but I believe this is the Dell recovery partition.

After chkdsk on Win 7 disk still shows RAW on E and F.

On linux-testdisk shows:

Partition Start End Size in sectors
1 P Dell Utility 0 32 33 12 223 19 204800
2 * HPFS - NTFS 12 223 20 1925 27 22 30720000
3 P HPFS - NTFS 1925 27 23 77825 48 31 1219334832


Listing contents of partition 2 shows:

Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged.

After testdisk advanced> boot :

Disk /dev/sdb - 640 GB / 596 GiB - CHS 77825 255 63
Partition Start End Size in sectors
2 * HPFS - NTFS 12 223 20 1925 27 22 30720000

Boot sector
ntfs_boot_sector: Can't read boot sector.
Status: Bad

Backup boot sector
Status: OK

Sectors are not identical.

A valid NTFS Boot sector must be present in order to access
any data; even if the partition is not bootable.


Selecting rebuild BS or backup BS returns:

Write error: Can't overwrite NTFS boot sector

selecting partition 3 [boot] gives:

Disk /dev/sdb - 640 GB / 596 GiB - CHS 77825 255 63
Partition Start End Size in sectors
3 P HPFS - NTFS 1925 27 23 77825 48 31 1219334832

Boot sector
Status: OK

Backup boot sector
Status: OK

Sectors are identical.

selecting List gives:

3 P HPFS - NTFS 1925 27 23 77825 48 31 1219334832
Directory /

dr-xr-xr-x 0 0 0 26-Feb-2009 20:51 .
dr-xr-xr-x 0 0 0 26-Feb-2009 20:51 ..
-r--r--r-- 0 0 8192 25-Sep-2010 13:36 BOOTSECT.BAK

then selecting repair MFT gives :

Cant' read NTFS MFT


Maybe the BOOTSECT.BAK being read only is the problem?


Also partition F which I believe shows as partition 3 in testdisk is apparently the one with Win7 OS on it and still continues to be seen by chkdsk as RAW. Win 7 keeps asking to format disk. Pretty sure this will wipe everything and I have no way to re-install Windows and have no intention of doing so.

Thanks for your help so far.

ZAR recovery shows many ( >50) bad sectors. Went back to Win 7 format, unchecked quick format partition F and let run overnight. Windows returns with "Windows was unable to complete the format"

From the looks of it this drive is toast and I have reached the point of diminishing returns on my time.

Thanks for the help