Serious HDD errors. Please help

Iggy09

Junior Member
Feb 7, 2007
9
0
0
Hi everyone, I have been receiving a number of hard drive errors and I would really appreciate some insight from the experts here.

Well, it started yesterday when I ran PerfectDisk to defrag my Hitachi SATA2 250gb hard drive. It ran fine until towards the end when I came across numerous errors that said something like "$Mft is corrupt or unreadable". Whenever I clicked ok the defrag continued. I shut my computer down when it was completed.

However, when i turned on my PC today, I realized that i cannot read that drive (D:) anymore. It says that the drive is not formatted. When I try to diagnose it with Norton Disk Doctor or CheckIt Diagnostics, it says that "The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and the volume is not corrupted."

I tried to run checkdisk but it refuses to run. It says something like "unrecoverable portion".

I decided to try a demo version of a program called Active Partition Recovery. This program managed to detect the drive and I could view the files on the hard drive through the software. But in the demo version there is no way to restore my files.

When I tried to run Windows Repair, it detected my 250gb hard drive as "unformatted or damaged".

I tried to run Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT) but the program hung on me when at "detecting primary slave".

I have a lot of critical data on that drive and I desperately need my files intact. Does anyone have any opinions on what I can do to salvage it? I would really appreciate any help or advice.

Thanks for your time.
 

dclive

Elite Member
Oct 23, 2003
5,626
2
81
I'd suggest buying the Active Partition Recovery program, if that is able to successfully read the files. $35 seems like a small price to pay. If your MFT is corrupt, there's no quick and easy fix I"m aware of... restore from backup or find a program that can fix it....
 

Iggy09

Junior Member
Feb 7, 2007
9
0
0
I couldn't get Active File Recovery over here. I purchased IOLO Search and Recover (one of the few I could find) instead but it won't even accrss the disk. I've even tried mbrfix to no effect. I finally got Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test to run. I ran the advanced test but it declared the drive error free. Anyone has any suggestions?
 

Jiggz

Diamond Member
Mar 10, 2001
4,329
0
76
Originally posted by: Iggy09
I couldn't get Active File Recovery over here. I purchased IOLO Search and Recover (one of the few I could find) instead but it won't even accrss the disk. I've even tried mbrfix to no effect. I finally got Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test to run. I ran the advanced test but it declared the drive error free. Anyone has any suggestions?

You should be able to use the Demo version and activate it or buy online! After running mbrfix then try chkdsk again to see if it can rebuild the mbr. Or the Norton Disk Utility.