# How do I repair a corrupted MFT on an NTFS partition?



## henderson1977

Hi 

I had a perfectly working Western Digital WD2000JB 200GB hard drive running 1 NTFS partition (not ideal I know!), storing media files (inc. AVI, MPEG, MP3, PDF, RAR, ZIP, EXE). It does not have an OS on it, Windows 2000 is running on my boot drive (Seagate 6GB).

Then one day I get an error in the Event Viewer: 

*Event ID: 55 
Event Source: NTFS 
Event Description: The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume <drive letter>:. * 

- AND I get an error when trying to access this partition 
- AND Windows 2000 recognises the file system as "unknown" and 0 bytes 

I have tried almost EVERYTHING (except format and start again!) 
- ran chkdsk, but get error "corrupted master file table" - chkdsk is unable to read drive 
- checked cables (hardware) connected fine 
- recovery console doesn't allow access to the drive also, although 'fixboot' has allowed the drive to be recognised as an NTFS file system in Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro software but not Windows 2000 or XP, hence is still not accessible! ('fixmbr' was useless too!)

- moved the hard drive into my Windows XP PC which recognises it with a "RAW" file system with 0 bytes and still cannot access it

- inspired by the use of the term "RAW file system", I'm using Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro software to perform a "Raw Recovery" of the data from this drive, so far it has recognised 109GB (oh yes!) but will recover the data in folder organised by the file's extension, for example, all AVI files will be in a folder marked "….AVI" and so on and each file will be marked "File001.AVI" and so on… so you can see this is not recovering the filename which means I will have to manually amend each and every file until all are named correctly - a very long job, but worthwhile perhaps (I'm losing my will!) - the only problem with a Raw Recovery is that it is limited to recovering only 200 file extensions, I have checked that it is not going to recover MPG, MPEG & RAR files to name but a few, however, I can add my own extensions but need to "enter the signature in hexadecimal format with a maximum of 8 bytes (ie. 1A 00 00 03 00 00 14 00). The signature offset should be zero relative and less than 512 bytes." Apparently I can use WinHex (www.winhex.com) to gather this information to generate the signatures for MPG, MPEG & RAR files, but so far have no succeeded (I'm getting errors when trying to create them!)

- my next step is to try an "Advanced Recovery" using Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro software. This does not suffer the limitations or Raw Recovery and will try to recover all the data 'as was' (I should have tried this 1st but I ain't quitting an 8hr Raw Recovery half-way through!)

- I have tried another product called GetDataBack for NTFS which works in a similar way to Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro software and did recognise 109GB of data that can be recovered.

- I have tried other products to repair the corrupted MFT (master file table) such as "Partition Table Doctor" but not having much luck.


*My question is this… is there a way to repair a corrupted MFT (master file table) on an NTFS partition, instead of trying data recovery techniques? (It would say so much time having to rename files/folders after data recovery). If so, how? What software do I need? Or perhaps only a specialised data recovery company have the answer??? Any help appreciated!!*

Thank you in advance. 

P.s. I have bought another 200GB drive and will sure be employing a backup strategy as soon as I get my data back! ;o)


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## dai

http://www.ntfs.com/partition-recovery-concepts.htm
http://www.disk.fdepot.com/NTFS-Utilities.asp
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303079/EN-US/
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;814594
see if any of these help


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