URGENT! file recovery

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Hypernova

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#7375 10-Apr-2006 10:33

For no apparent reason the 3 partitions on my external HD decided to go boom, now I need ways of reparing it.

Here's the situation:
1st partition: NTFS 100GB
2nd and 3rd:100GB,70GB FAT32

basically last nignt when i tried to access files in the 3 drives I suddenly go a file corrupt on all folders. using CHKDSK /f fixed the 2 FAT32's but when I try to fix the NTFS one I get "Cannot determine drive type and condition" and can no longer click into the partition under windows.

I tried using R-studio however several file's are still not picket up, there are no fragmented files in the partition since I use it as an archive and it was frequently defraged. Therefore the only other way I can think of is try and rebuild the screwed up MFT.

Is there any recovery programme that does that? I can only find one that scan files but none that actually repair the partition itself and CHKDSK refuse to work on NTFS.

Once upon a time everyone in Europe believed in God and his teachings on love thy neighbours and peace, historians referes to this period as THE DARK AGES.

hadders

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#32707 10-Apr-2006 15:17

Try GetDataBack

http://www.runtime.org/

I've used it before on an NTFS filesystem. It does a sector scan. You'll have to buy it once you run it from the Free version and see if it finds anything (remember to save the scan!).

H

hadders

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#32708 10-Apr-2006 15:21

On another note....

A word of warning about the Firewire chipsets in the enclosures. For some reason the chipset manufacturers have bugs in the implementation. Some chipsets with earlier revisions can't handle heavy data traffic, as such, they would fall over and nail the FAT, this gets reported as a write delay error. I had this happen to me. Long story short, a Firmware update to the Firewire chipset fixed this problem and since then, I've had no issues.

For the full details pertaining to this visit Bustrace's Info

In short download and run the 1394Test.exe utility BEFORE you put any precious data on the disk using Firewire as an interface. You may have to hunt for the right Firmware updates for your chipset/enclosure combo if the test reports any problems.

If you've had this problem, using any software that does a sector scan of the disk is sufficient to recover the info. Sector scans ignore the FAT and move through the entire disk finding what's there.

Hypernova

50 posts

Geek

#32716 10-Apr-2006 16:11

hadders: On another note....

A word of warning about the Firewire chipsets in the enclosures. For some reason the chipset manufacturers have bugs in the implementation. Some chipsets with earlier revisions can't handle heavy data traffic, as such, they would fall over and nail the FAT, this gets reported as a write delay error. I had this happen to me. Long story short, a Firmware update to the Firewire chipset fixed this problem and since then, I've had no issues.

For the full details pertaining to this visit Bustrace's Info

In short download and run the 1394Test.exe utility BEFORE you put any precious data on the disk using Firewire as an interface. You may have to hunt for the right Firmware updates for your chipset/enclosure combo if the test reports any problems.

If you've had this problem, using any software that does a sector scan of the disk is sufficient to recover the info. Sector scans ignore the FAT and move through the entire disk finding what's there.

Hm.. that might be true since it is a firewire that I got since I ran out of usb ports (didn't realise such issue existed, paid NZ30$ extra for the FW model too when USB only was cheaper...).
R-studio can do the scan but the problem is it didn't manage to pick up everything back, a few files are still missing. The HD was used up to 92/102GB and R-studio missed about 6GB worth of files. All other files are intact.

Once upon a time everyone in Europe believed in God and his teachings on love thy neighbours and peace, historians referes to this period as THE DARK AGES.

hadders

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#32718 10-Apr-2006 16:15

Yeap, sounds like the same problem I had. Plug it in and *bham* Write delay, followed by corrupt disk errors! You can try GetDataBack for free, if it finds your missing files that R-Studio doesn't then you can consider if the purchase is worth it.
I would recommend testing the unit with the Firewire utility once the you've recovered and backed up the data.
I've had no problems since I flashed the firewire chipset.

Hypernova

50 posts

Geek

#32727 10-Apr-2006 17:30

Ok scan started and will take an hour.

Just wondering why NTFS is so fragile. When the partition went down CHKDSK /f restored the FAT32 ones within a split second. In fact all it did was report the data usage etc and the partitions were back up again yet it refuse to do anything to the NTFS one.

Now I thought NTFS was a more advanced format yet it seems it is not as robust as FAT32.

Once upon a time everyone in Europe believed in God and his teachings on love thy neighbours and peace, historians referes to this period as THE DARK AGES.

hadders

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#32729 10-Apr-2006 17:36

Good question. You'd assume something called "New Technology File System (NTFS)" would be a New Technology that doesn't suck. still the error nails the FAT (file allocation table), if I remember vaguely, FAT32 keeps a backup, so I assume that NTFS does too, but perhaps the error nails both those for NTFS...

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#32738 10-Apr-2006 19:51

You are probably dealing with an error that overwrites the main tables with corrupt data. In this case there's nothing much it can be done: OS requests interface to send WRITE operation, interfaces send wrong stuff to HDD, HDD records what's is ordered to, and interface sends back to OS a message "Ooops, sorry I just sent this out, but it does not match what you asked before". The OS reports to the program an I/O error.

Since this is a firmware problem on the interface it's hard to blame the OS, right?

BTW, Hadders know this happened to me: plugged a 250GB disc, worked ok for read. The moment I started a backup the disc went belly up. This on a brand new machine. My old machine (3 years old) runs a 1TB Maxtor firewire now and I had it creating a Norton Ghost image at the same as doing a full backup from my desktop: not a problem at all...

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