Help: Corrupt NTFS Partition

[tungtung]

I was doing video capture using the ATI MMC on Win 2k last night when the program suddenly crashed the entire system. Upon restarting, those usual Win2k CHKDSK prompts came up and I let it finish up. However upon entering Windows Explorer, I noticed that one of my drive is suddenly seen as a non-partitioned drive (it used to have an NTFS partition). I tried using Win2k's CHKDSK again on the disk, but it deleted everything on the drive, though it now allows me to "use" the drive as an empty partition.

Does anyone know any tool that might be able to recover my files from this drive/partition?
Any thought as to why this happens? Because my other partitions are FAT 32 partitions (which I need to dual boot between Win 98 and Win 2k) both are not affected at all, only this NTFS partition.

 

[Slikkster]

If this is a physical drive, your master boot record could have become corrupted. The Windows 2000 Recovery Console has a couple of commands that may help. You're interested in two commands.

First, the "Map" command, which will give you "Device Names" of your hard drives and partitions. Make note of the device names after running the map command.

Once you know the proper device name for the drive in question, use the "fixmbr" command to rewrite the master boot record.

By the way, fixmbr will frequently give a very ominous warning when running it. Look here: Ignore this warning

How to use Recovery Console, you ask? Windows 2000 Recovery Console explained

Maybe someone else can chime in if they know of any FREE 3rd party utilities that can recover damaged NTFS partitions/files.

 

[redbeard1]

The person in this thread tried Acronis recovery expert and had a good result.

Thread

EDIT

If your are planning on trying to recover it, do not write any data to it, or it will make any recovery even harder.

 

[imported_Phil]

GetDataBack for NTFS is excellent in these situations, having heard that Acronis can take a very long time to scan the drive with a slower machine.
Both of them are worth a try, but I prefer GetDataBack, hasn't failed me yet

 

[mtnagel]

Originally posted by: DopeFiend
GetDataBack for NTFS is excellent in these situations, having heard that Acronis can take a very long time to scan the drive with a slower machine.
Both of them are worth a try, but I prefer GetDataBack, hasn't failed me yet

I guess you are probably referring to
My Thread. Yep, Acronis took 19 hrs (for the thorough scan) to get about a third of the way through on my 350 mHz machine. GetDataBack took about 5 hours and I was able to get every last file back!

Oh, and I tried about 5 other data recovery programs before that and none worked - I had almost given up hope and then I posted here!

Matthew

 

[tungtung]

I've tried those softwares ... and couple others ... but it seems that the data was just gone from the drive.
Any other suggestion? Also does anyone has any clue why this happens?

 

[Slikkster]

DiskPatch Try the demo version to see if it "sees" any of your files. If so, you can buy it.

 

[redbeard1]

I just talked with a friend and he reminded me that this program is very highly rated. I know a number of people here have given it good reviews.

R studio

 

[tungtung]

Well, I gave up ... I've tried those softwares none seems to be able to recover the data from the drive at all.
The strange thing now is that the data from that drive seems to be missing every so often.
Could this be a problem of the drive partition or something worse?

 

[tungtung]

By the way this drive was a western digital drive that I partitioned using the western digital utility.

The partition I created was an NTFS partition, I was trying to make a FAT 32 partition but Win98 just won't let me use the entire 160 GB space on the drive. So I was stuck with NTFS. Anyway ... after that last incident, and all those failed attempts of recovering the files on the drive, I finally decided to reformat the drive just in case.

Yesterday, I was reinstalling Win2000 on the system (on a different drive, this drive with the problem was only used for data) and once I finished loading up all the data and stuff I looked at this NTFS drive, and the newer data that is supposed to be there are all gone. The only data remains are the one from just after I reformat the drive.

Does anyone has any possible clue of what's going on here?
I did run my anti-virus just in case but nothing turns up.
So should I just repartition the drive? If yes should I just do fdisk on it or use utilities like Partition Magic or the western digital utility again?

 

[mtnagel]

Originally posted by: tungtung

So should I just repartition the drive? If yes should I just do fdisk on it or use utilities like Partition Magic or the western digital utility again?

I am by no means an expert on this, but I didn't like Partition Magic. It lost my data and all I was trying to do was merge 2 partitions. All their tech support could say was, "It happens" and "You should have backed-up your data." Yeah, big help. I was told PM was the best when I bought it, but I've gone to no partition after this mess - AND I now will back up my data regularly (and I keep a copy of the back-up in a satellite location - work).

 

[BigFatCow]

Originally posted by: mtnagel

Originally posted by: tungtung

So should I just repartition the drive? If yes should I just do fdisk on it or use utilities like Partition Magic or the western digital utility again?

I am by no means an expert on this, but I didn't like Partition Magic. It lost my data and all I was trying to do was merge 2 partitions. All their tech support could say was, "It happens" and "You should have backed-up your data." Yeah, big help. I was told PM was the best when I bought it, but I've gone to no partition after this mess - AND I now will back up my data regularly (and I keep a copy of the back-up in a satellite location - work).

i lost a bunch of data when i tried to merge two partitions together also.