MFT and MFT Mirror Are Bad Failed to Repair Them

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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RodLockwood
Posts: 8
Joined: 07 Apr 2018, 08:56

MFT and MFT Mirror Are Bad Failed to Repair Them

#1 Post by RodLockwood »

Hello, I was having some errors with two thumb drives, and decided to run chkdsk. For the past few months, when trying to chkdsk them they would first report that the drives were raw, and abort. Then I would repeat the command and they would report they were NTFS (which is correct) and continue the chkdsk. This time though, they had problems. I finally fixed them down to just one problem, they couldn’t repair the MFT mirror because they kept running out of memory.

So I used DiskPart on Windows 7 Pro and did a clear all before formatting to ntfs. Both thumb drives formatted successfully.
I ran chkdsk on one of them and still had the same out of memory error and chkdsk aborted.

So I went to TestDisk, to have it repair the MFT on both drives. One reported that both the MFT and MFT mirror were good. The other reported that the MFT and MFT mirror were both bad and could not be fixed. I also have Linux Mint on the PC.

I know there is a way to have Test Disk give the drive a new MBR, but is there some way of doing the same with the MFT?

Correction: Despite the one drive reporting that both the MFT and MFT mirror match perfectly, they both abort the chkdsk because they run out of memory fixing the mirror. Also it did not fix detecting either of them as Raw instead of NTFS half the time.

Update: This is weird. I backed up the data and reformatted both drives. They are both unlabeled. TestDisk still reports that both the MFT and its mirror match perfectly on both drives. Therefore as far as TestDisk is concerned there is nothing to fix. I have tried repairing with DiskPart and BootRec. If I run ChkDsk /r on XP or with the Windows 7 64 bit System Repair disk, they are recognized as NTFS every time. They both complete ChkDsk and exit with no problems. If I run ChkDsk /r using the Elevated Command Line on Windows 7 Pro, they are detected as raw. Then I run ChkDsk again and they are detected properly as NTFS, but they both exit with the error message “Correcting errors in the MFT mirror. Insufficient disk space to repair MFT mirror. ChkDsk aborted.” My internal hard drive has 66 GB of 149 GB free. The thumb drives are 16 GB each.

RodLockwood
Posts: 8
Joined: 07 Apr 2018, 08:56

Re: MFT and MFT Mirror Are Bad Failed to Repair Them

#2 Post by RodLockwood »

I fixed them! I had tried a full format on both drives before, but this time I found the right keywords to find the answer on the Internet. All I had to do was change the policy on both drives from quick removal to better performance. When I did, the first time I formatted it failed, but I did it again and the format completed with no errors, on both drives. TestDrive confirmed both MFT and the mirror match perfectly.

However, I don’t think it fixed the problem of the drives being detected as Raw instead of NTFS half the time.

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