How to rescue an XP install with a damaged MFT due to sector fail on HDD

[Coup27]

A customer of mine has a ThinkPad T61 which began BSOD'ing on boot with "unable to load boot volume". I ran the ThinkPad HDD diagnostic utility built into the BIOS and the HDD failed. I reaffirmed this result by running a long test with SeaTools, which also said the HDD failed.

Next, I booted GParted to see if it would flag any information about the HDD, which it did. It gave me a warning saying the MFT could not be read and was damaged / corrupted. Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of this. I was hoping to shrink the partition down so it would fit onto one of my spare HDD's, image what I could onto a good disk and run a Windows repair but due to the MFT damage I could not shrink the partitions.

I decided to run a Windows repair on the disk anyway and hope for the best. It took an absolute age and eventually hung after the blue screen where it tells you all the wonderful features of XP. After that, it went to a black screen with the XP logo in the centre and that's where it hung.

Attempts to boot XP now still fail. It doesn't BSOD anymore, it actually gets past entering the users password but then sits at a blank blue screen. The cursor can move and the HDD can be heard chugging away but after 40 minutes on that screen it was safe to say it was going nowhere.

I went back into GParted to see if anything has changed and it didn't mention anything about the MFT, but gave me this warning instead:

There are some instructions on a possible solution from GParted but I thought I would seek advice here before proceeding. The laptop is from a small software company and it's full of purchased software with activated licence keys. A clean start with a new drive (prob SSD) is possible, but would be an epic PITA.

Thanks for any help.

 

[ch33zw1z]

1. That disk needs to be replaced. Do not continue trying to repair until you backup any critical/irreplaceable data.

2. Try cloning the disk to a different drive that isn't failing, and then try to recover the install. tools that can do this: clonezilla, acronis, macrium reflect. This may or may not be successful, since the source disk has bad sectors. Hope for the best.

3. If a reinstall is that much of a PITA, then the customer needs to keep an image of the install around so that recovery from a disk failure is not a hindrance.

 

[Coup27]

1. That disk needs to be replaced. Do not continue trying to repair until you backup any critical/irreplaceable data.

2. Try cloning the disk to a different drive that isn't failing, and then try to recover the install. tools that can do this: clonezilla, acronis, macrium reflect. This may or may not be successful, since the source disk has bad sectors. Hope for the best.

3. If a reinstall is that much of a PITA, then the customer needs to keep an image of the install around so that recovery from a disk failure is not a hindrance.

Thanks for your response.

1. First thing I did.

2. I don't have a notebook SATA HDD of equal or larger size which makes imaging or cloning a problem. Most imaging packages I know of won't let you paste an image onto a HDD of inferior size, even if the source image had enough free space to compensate. I tried to shrink the source partition to navigate around this but I can't.

3. I've been telling them this for years.

 

[Elixer]

How about you shrink the partition via gparted, and then dd the image to the smaller drive?

However, I am not too sure how many more chances you have with this HD, it might just die on you, then your customer is SOL unless they want to pay for a recovery service.
Also, it is also possible the bad sectors had info needed by some programs, so you would most likely have to reinstall them anyway, or you could end up with random errors down the road.

 

[Coup27]

GParted says it cannot read the file system information which means it cannot shrink the partitions because presumably it doesn't know the location of all of the files. As a result it won't allow me to shrink the partition.