Hard disk recovers fine one time, not at all the second.

[Ralicx]

Hi all

Recently my external 250gb drive decided to die as a result of me knocking it with my foot and the power cable coming loose. The MFT got corrupt and windows was unable to use the backup MFT for some reason. Anyway, this has happened before, so I know what to do, and don't panic.

Before using recover my files, I tried a piece of software called getdataback. I ran the scan and in the end it gave me the full directory structure of the drive as it was before it went corrupt, with the option to save the files. However I didn't have free space on another drive to save all the files I wanted to. So safe in the knowledge everything seemed to be there and intact, I closed the program and went to bed.

Next day I get hold of a hard drive with room on it to recover what I want. I run getdataback again. During the scan it reports it is finding 1000s of files, but when the scan is over. Nothing. It gives me no found ******ial partitions to select. I repeat this 3 times, deleting temporary files, reinstalling and everything. Note I have not re-formatted the drive or anything since it went dead.

I also own "recovery my files" which is the program I used to recover the same hard drive under the same circumstances before, and it worked a dream. I proceed to do the format recovery scan and as you say i pick around 5 file types. The disk had a fair few archives on it, along with large media files, disk image files, and some photos, so i pick what i can from the list, as well as the usual text files. Anyway, scan takes around 13 hours, it finds a few files, no movies or videos, finishes, and I cant remember the exact words but something along the lines of:

"cannot find any file system information on disk"

So yet again I am left in the same situation as before with my previous program. What can I do, and what has caused this to happen? Help.

Thanks

Chris

[admin]

Hi Chris,

It sounds like the MFT that was on your system and first identified by GetDataBack is now corrupt and unreadable.

MFTs are not particularly stable after you have had a problem with your drive - it is possible that windows tried to fix it when you rebooted, and what was there is no longer there.

Run RMF and do a "Fast Format Recover" of the physical drive. This will search to find the old MFT. This will be a quick search.

Next run a "Complete Format Recover" and search just for .doc, .xls, .ppt, .avi, .bmp, jpeg, .zip, .pdf. This search will look for individual MFT records - what you want to see is lots of OS items found in the progress window, as each one represents a single file with full file and folder name.

If you dont find any, then you can only run a "Complete File Search" to find files by the header and footer method, with is ok, but does not locate original names or original folder structure.

I hope this helps.