cgsecurity.org

Hi all,

I was wondering if someone had a tip for me. I have an old SATA drive from two computers ago that I took out of an external HDD enclosure (which wasn't working) and popped into a SATA dock on an HP Z800. Upon boot I was able to access the drive normally and copy off some files that I needed. However, a few days ago I went back in to recover more and Windows came up with the dreaded "File or Directory is Corrupt and Unreadable" error. I've run CHKDSK /F to no avail; it sees a lot of bad file segments and it fixes problems, but Windows still can't see it; however, upon accessing it with Testdisk I can see everything and even copy files off of it.

Testdisk reports that both the MFT and MFTMirr are identical, as well as the boot sectors. It doesn't detect any problems. NTFS is OK. Disk is healthy under Disk Management. Everything about the drive seems normal except for these corrupt file segments and the fact that Windows can't open it.

Any other ideas? Right now I'm running CHKDSK /R.

You can use testdisk to copy your files but don't expect to be able to boot from the copied files.
Run chkdsk /f until there is no error anymore.
If chkdsk /r reports some bad sectors, you should clone the disk using ddrescue as described in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Good luck

The drive died during chkdsk /r - when I attempted to use testdisk again it wouldn't load past "Please wait" and Disk management showed a raw partition. Eventually it stopped being recognized period, and I heard clicks coming from the drive, so I assume it's fried.

Before that happened I was able to copy off files that I needed with Testdisk, so thank you.