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PhotoRec On Disk With MTF Error

Posted: 18 Sep 2013, 23:19
by LeapingTortoise
Hi all,

First time posting. I apologise if this has been posted elsewhere, but my search didn't really find specifically what I'm looking for.

History:
So I used my laptop for uni and accumulated A LOT of data doing my course. Recently this hard drive died big time. I'm talking 3 seconds into a surface scan and you already have 10,000 bad sectors (or close enough). Luckily I kept a backup on an external HDD on my desktop (a 1TB WD Green HDD, hooked up using eSATA, MoBo set for AHCI). Unfortunately before I had the opportunity to get a new HDD to re-backup my backup drive has also died. They died within 2 days of each other (talk about first world bad luck)

What I mean by "died:"
Turned my PC on one day and got a "H: Connected, would you like to format?" ... No... First thing I did was run a scan to see if this drive was also faulty. Luckily the drive shows up with no bad sectors, so looks like it's just a file system thing, which I guess is lucky given the original laptop drive is so far gone. I fired up testdisk, but when using the Analyse -> Quick/Deeper Search -> List Files I get the following message.

Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged.

If I go Advanced -> Boot I get a message saying both MBR's are fine. Select "Repair MFT" and get:

MTF and MTF mirror are bad. Failed to repair them.

1) Is there any way of fixing this in test disk?
2) (This is the main question) Photorecovery can pull all the files off, but there's no names or file structure. Because of the number of files and the need for file structure this makes sorting through them all but impossible. Is there a trick with photorecovery that I might be able to try? (Also, a side note is that some files appeared to be split in half, is that normal?)
3) In the likely event that I need to buy commercial software to recover the partition or file structure in tact, is there a particular set of recommended software for this task.