What tools are available for recovering corrupted NTFS partitions?

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Good day to all.

I have an older netbook that normally has a 500GB drive installed in it. The drive is partitioned as a 15GB “C” drive, with the rest going to the “D” partition.

I was asked to loan the machine for a few weeks and thought that I’d save myself possible problems by pulling the existing drive and installing an un-used sata drive with a fresh Windows XP installation, fully patched. That let the borrower have a machine with the fastest possible speed and saved my working drive from damage or tampering.

I just got the machine back – the borrower was very happy with it. However, upon re-installing my original drive, I got the infamous “NTLDR is missing” error message. I obviously messed up somehow but I’m not sure what.

Because this is a netbook without optical drive, I decided to just pull the drive and use one of my USB – IDE / SATA adapters to see what the problem was. And here it gets interesting.

The “D” partition is fine – I can see all of the files and directories. However, the “C” partition is un-readable.

If this were a FAT-32 partition, I’d just fire up my old copy of Norton Disk Doctor and see what was up. But: its formatted NTFS and I don’t have any diagnostic / repair tools for NTFS volumes.

So: before I give up and just restore my last image (one and a bit years old), I thought that I’d ask the general community how others would tackle this particular problem. I won’t lose anything important if I do just restore that old image but I’d like to learn if this is something that can be easily fixed.

Many thanks!

dwayne

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I would install the disk as a second drive in another machine and see what shows up. Don’t run any repair tools on it until you have imaged it / backed it up. Don’t try to repair it in a USB enclosure because these units hide the disk from repair tools.

cheers, Paul

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Don’t try to repair it in a USB enclosure because these units hide the disk from repair tools.

OK – I can install the drive in one of my desktop machines. But: what repair tools are available? Names, URLs greatly appreciated.

dwayne

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The first thing to do is to see if check disk will run against the bad partition. If that does not work then I would recommend that you just reinstall the OS and all your programs. That will probably be faster in the long run. Unless I had data on the partition that I really needed I would just start over.

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The first thing to do is to see if check disk will run against the bad partition

Well, I must be tired or something – it never even occurred to me to run chkdsk. I left the drive connected to my IDE / SATA – USB adapter and did just that. Chkdsk did make the drive bootable after finding several thousand lost fragments. There is sufficient damage that I don’t want to even try to recover from this, given that I have a known-good image to fall back upon.

But – it let me at least document what had been installed since I took the last image more than a year ago. Not all that much, actually. I just made a list of all applications installed after the date of the most recent image and saved it to the “D” partition.

Acronis has just now finished restoring that year-old image and everything looks good. Now I’m off to install all of the intervening Windows updates.

And, of course, I’ll take a new image when I’m finished.

Thanks for the suggestions!

dwayne

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