Is there any way to repair a damaged NTFS partition?

[aka1nas]

My main system has a 24GB NTFS partition running XP Pro. It's been working fine, but all of the sudden I find that it will not boot the OS. Upon closer inspection, I notice that its hanging where it would normallly detect the OS. I booted off the XP CD and saw that my 24GB main partition is still there but listed as an unkown partition. My other 14GB partition is still fine and listed as NTFS. Is it possible to repair this partiton w/o doing a full reinstall? It won't kill me to reinstall everything, but I have midterms the next few weeks and would'nt mind saving some time if possible.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Linux's version of fdisk is able to set a partition type, so you could get a linux boot disk with that on it (a full Linux install CD should let you drop to fdisk to manually configure partitions and do this). I think that would work to set it as NTFS again. However whether that will actually recover the partition or not, I dunno. What happened just before you discovered this?

 

[AkumaBao]

Ever check to make sure your boot.ini file is not corrupted? It could also be your NTLDR file that is ruined. Nothing the repair console can't fix. I wouldn't advise using the Linux fdisk unless you really know Linux, not to mention I don't think that will fix your MBR which seems to be the problem. At last resort, you could just reinstall w/o removing the files (Leave current files intact), and just having to reinstall your apps.

 

[mboy]

yup, recovery comsole is the 1st place to start start with chkdsk and then try the fixmbr comands

 

[Lord Evermore]

Well, I assumed that the boot record was fine since his other partition is still working. He also can't simply reinstall, because Setup won't recognize that there's a current NTFS partition, it will show an unknown partition that it will need to delete completely. fixmbr might work, but I don't really think so. Chkdsk of course won't work because it doesn't have a recognizable partition to read.