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Reparing NTFS file system

G

Goi

Diamond Member
Hi,
I recently somehow corrupted the file system for 1 of my USB external drives. I have 2 drives, and somehow during the plugging/unplugging of the drives, windows decided to modify drive 2 to look exactly like drive 1. I see the same files/folders in drive 2 as drive 1, but obviously the actual contents of drive 2 is completely different. I'm also unable to access any of those visible files/folders, since they're obviously not there.

Since the data is most probably still intact, is there any way to restore/repair the file system for drive 2? TIA!
 
Did you try to plugin you drives to another pc?

Look here

If you lost the partition you should use a software like Disk Director. (I used it, then lost the partition).

And I advise you to back up you data or even hole hd after you recover it.
 
Yes I tried it on 2 different PCs, a WinXP and a Linux PC, and they both show the same contents for the drive, which is wrong. I hexedited the drive in Linux and found that the partition table is pretty much intact and good, and is recognized as NTFS, so I didn't lose the partition, it's just that something messed up the file system table or something.

And yes, this is the 2nd time something weird happened to this drive so I'll definitely transfer the data out, repartition/format it and then transfer it back.
 
I actually tried recovering the drive with Advanced NTFS Recovery 3.1 and DiskInternals NTFS Recovery 1.91, and they were both able to see the original files/folders in the drive, but the demo doesn't allow me to actually recover those files/folders. Incidentally the 2 software seem to be nearly identical...

I'll try GetDataBack at home, I believe I already have it installed there.
 
Thanks Pirotech. I actually tried Restoration before, but while it's freeware, it kinda sucks for anything more than a recently deleted file or 2. It won't handle bigger problems like this. I'm actually scanning my drive with GetDataBack as I type this, but I won't be recovering any of them since I left my backup drive in the office. Just checking the software out.
 
Originally posted by: Goi
Hi,
I recently somehow corrupted the file system for 1 of my USB external drives. I have 2 drives, and somehow during the plugging/unplugging of the drives, windows decided to modify drive 2 to look exactly like drive 1. I see the same files/folders in drive 2 as drive 1, but obviously the actual contents of drive 2 is completely different. I'm also unable to access any of those visible files/folders, since they're obviously not there.

Since the data is most probably still intact, is there any way to restore/repair the file system for drive 2? TIA!
Click to expand...

I'm horribly confused. Are you 100% positive the drives aren't FAT drives? (most USB sticks are). It soundes like you have delayed writing on and somehow the system wrote the wrong fat out. If this is NTFS, they your basically saying somehow the MFT was overwritten. And if that is the case, the MFT itself includes the first portion of the file so the data is indeed corrupted.

Basically, at least from the description, these have to be fat drives (wondering what else could be going on.....)
 
These are external USB hard drives, not UFDs. They are 2.5" laptop drives in a USB enclosure, and they're 10-60GB, so yes I'm positively sure the affected 60GB drive is NTFS and not FAT. I'm not sure if the other 10GB drive whose file structure is copied over is FAT32 or NTFS and I can't check since it's not with me right now. It could be that the first drive is FAT, but the affected drive is definitely NTFS.

Anyway, here's what I remembered happen. This was last week so events may not be 100% accurate

The 10GB drive was connected to a laptop via a USB cable. Some application accessing the drive may have been running.
Some smart guy decided to disconnect the drive and then insert the 60GB drive.
The drives have the same USB VID/PID but different S/N, and was most probably mounted as the same drive letter.
60GB drive subsequently shows the file structure of the 10GB drive, even though total/used/free space still remained unchanged as far as I can tell.
Trying to access any of the folders/files results in the error message "X:\Folder is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." Accessing the drive root is ok.

Anyway, GetDataBack seems to be able to read the actual files on the drive after the scan. I tried opening a video file and it works. Hopefully the rest of the thousands of files it finds are uncorrupted and working too.
 
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