Can someone give me advise on reparing and NTFS file system

[donjonson]

Ok kind of a long story..

Windows XP
P4a 2.0Ghz
1 gig ddr333
120G SATA HDD (NTFS windows partition)
9800xt AGP


I was installing the Zune software so I could have connectivity with my new xbox360. During the installation the hdd was making several squeak---CLICK sound at regular intervals. During this behavior the computer was frozen. This continued for a while so I did a stupid thing. During the installation I hit the reset button. When I went to reboot the hdd was doing the same thing and it was not detected so I was sure the drive went bad. I wiggled the cable and now it is recognized and the sounds are gone. Well now windows won?t boot. It sits at the windows xp screen with the blue bar just cycling forever. I tired safe mode and it hangs at mup.sys. I believe the partition has been corrupted but the bad SATA cable. So I pop in the windows installation cd so I can boot into the recovery console well It loads fine but when I get to the screen where you press enter to continue and r for recovery, the keyboard stops responding. I believe the system is locked so I hit the reset button. So I download a dos boot disk with NTFS4DOS so that I can perform a chkdsk on my hdd. well apparently there is a chkdsk version that works with NTFS however it does not work very well. I keep getting an unspecified error at the end of step 2. So I believe what I need is the chkntfs program but when I put that on the boot disk it wont run with the following error ?this cannot run in dos mode?. I am stuck! I don?t know what else to do. I don?t want to wipe the drive and reinstall windows. I have a program that will get all the data off but that is not what I want. If anyone has any suggestions I am very open to them. Thank you!

The fact that this is an NTFS file system on an SATA drive makes this problem all the more difficult because dos does not recognize NTFS and many repair tools are only for IDE.


Thank you for reading this long post and I appreciate any suggestions you might have.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

Mods, don't lock this but do move it to the appropriate forum.

 

[yinan]

Dont wipe the drive just reinstall Windows seems the easiest solution.

Jim

 

[LeiZaK]

Put it in the freezer

 

[goatjc]

chkdsk, windows repair, spinrite are looking into. If it's making a "clicking" noise, start backing up.

 

[ColdFusion718]

Originally posted by: LeiZaK
Put it in the freezer

This is a genuine method used by data recovery services. It's for real. I told a friend of mine about it and he was able to recover the data off of a HD that was "dead."

 

[j00fek]

http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=27&flcache=3725784&entercat=y

 

[MisterJackson]

Originally posted by: ColdFusion718

Originally posted by: LeiZaK
Put it in the freezer

This is a genuine method used by data recovery services. It's for real. I told a friend of mine about it and he was able to recover the data off of a HD that was "dead."

^
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This is genuine bullsh1t, and will likely cause you to lose your data, assuming you want it and haven't screwed it up too much already.

Your drive is toast. Clicking sound = replace, perod.

Fresh install from there.

PROFESSIONAL data recovery services DO NOT freeze drives. I do in house data recovery and have sent 100's of drives to OnTrack for the next level data recovery if we can't get it. They disassemble the HDD in a clean lab and recover data from the platter.

They do not go ghetto and freeze your drive.

Freezing your drive may work one in one thousand times, if that. Freezing it will also likely cause any air in the HDD to possibly freeze, then melt after it's out, giving you condensation inside, which is a bad idea.

If I were you, and if you need data, I'd find a good data recovery app, ontrack makes one called easy data recovery, it works well. Then I'd set the drive as a slave in another machine, making sure you also have another drive besides that one to back up recovered data to. Then, if the drive clicks and doesn't respond or locks, shut down, put the hdd in different positions (upside down, sideways, etc.) and you just might get it to spin long enough to work.

Beating the drive is a last resort and has woked for me in many cases.

 

[Rapidskies]

Buy a new drive. Install onto that and put your old drive in the system off the secondary channel and see if you can see it at all in windows. If you can get your data off of it asap. If it doesn't see it try the freezer thing in a ziploc bag. It might enable you to access it long enought to get the data off. Don't worry about condensation as the drive platters are in an air tight compartment. Gluck.

 

[donjonson]

the dirve doesn't seem to have gone bad. I have been scaning it with @ctive tools it is seem to be functioning normally. I think the cable is bad and cased some improper behavior. I am gong to replace the drive but is there a way to run something like chkdsk for ntfs from dos and repair the file system? or should I just take the loss and save my data and reinstall?

 

[Kelemvor]

I use getdataback for NTFS. Don't know if it matters IDE vs Sata. You load it on a working drive and add the second drive to the same PC. It scans it and does a pretty good job most of the time.