NTFS Filesystem repair
Posted: 06 May 2017, 18:54
I have a 1TB NTFS external backup drive that is unreadable. The drive has a single NTFS parition on it, which Windows disk management now shows as RAW. Below is a list of things that I have found and things I have tried.
1. Run chkdsk /r on the drive, which says the mft is corrupt. chkdsk is unable to repair it and aborts
2.Using TestDisk 7.1 WIP went to advanced->boot where there were warnings about the number of heads and sectors being incorrect (both were set to 1). Both the boot sector and its backup had a status of 'OK'. Running repairMFT, TestDisk reports that both the MFT and its mirror are perfectly matched. I also ran RebuildBS (without changing any disk geomentry) which didn't seem to do anything. I cannot list the files from the partition
4. Under Geometry I set Heads = 255 and Sectors = 63 based on the recommendation from TestDisk. Analyze shows the NTFS partition, but I cannot list files. Running RepairMFT and RebuildBS again made no difference.
5. Under Analyze I did a deep search, which found a bunch of bogus partitions. Thinking that perhaps there were issues with the partition table I selected the NTFS partition from the quick search and wrote it to disk. Still not change.
From all of this I have gathered that my partition table is fine, but that my MFT is fried since I can't get to the filesystem. I was able to view some of the files using the Zero Assumption Recovery linked in the wiki. Any suggestions as to how I can recover the filesystem on this drive?
Thanks!
1. Run chkdsk /r on the drive, which says the mft is corrupt. chkdsk is unable to repair it and aborts
2.Using TestDisk 7.1 WIP went to advanced->boot where there were warnings about the number of heads and sectors being incorrect (both were set to 1). Both the boot sector and its backup had a status of 'OK'. Running repairMFT, TestDisk reports that both the MFT and its mirror are perfectly matched. I also ran RebuildBS (without changing any disk geomentry) which didn't seem to do anything. I cannot list the files from the partition
4. Under Geometry I set Heads = 255 and Sectors = 63 based on the recommendation from TestDisk. Analyze shows the NTFS partition, but I cannot list files. Running RepairMFT and RebuildBS again made no difference.
5. Under Analyze I did a deep search, which found a bunch of bogus partitions. Thinking that perhaps there were issues with the partition table I selected the NTFS partition from the quick search and wrote it to disk. Still not change.
From all of this I have gathered that my partition table is fine, but that my MFT is fried since I can't get to the filesystem. I was able to view some of the files using the Zero Assumption Recovery linked in the wiki. Any suggestions as to how I can recover the filesystem on this drive?
Thanks!