Missing MFT

[David R]

I am working to recover data from a Toshiba laptop hard drive. The hard drive was physically damaged. I was able to open it and straighten out the cover and get the disk to spin. Damage is not visible to the disk itself. I have run Recover My File (Fast format) and found only the FAT section, although it identifies that the NTFS section exists. I am trying to run the Full format to recover the NTFS files. One of the things that I have noticed is that, at the end of the scan of the FAT section (roughly sector 86000), the scan slows to a crawl. I have no file types selected to recover. I am running the demo version as this is being done to evaluate the program for purchase. By the way, the fast format took about 15 hours to run. This seemed long from reading the other posts. Should I still be able to recover the files.

[kate]

It definitely sounds like there are some physical problems with the hard disk.

The fast format recover should only take a few minutes. The scan is slowing to a crawl when it reaches the damaged sections of the disk.

If the data is critical I would recommend getting a quote for hardware recovery, which you can do by following this link: http://www.recovermyfiles.com/data-recovery-service.php

[David R]

Kate,
That may be the case. However, it seems somewhat of a coincidence that this is also, precisely, the beginning of the NTFS partition, while the other was a FAT partition. I'm going to wait to see what comes up with the long format. Thanks.