HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi to all,

Have a disk WD 1Tb, that the folders are all corrupted, i try to run RS and could find some files but not all.

Also the client when connect the disk told-me that it made a scan disk in windows xp, but did not solve the problem.

in WInhex appear like this:




Anyone had worked in a case like this one.


Any info will be great.


Regards

Whatever you do, sector image the complete drive to another 1Tb drive, then remove the original and do the recovery work on the clone drive.

In the past, with FAT32 this would have been easy with Norton Disk Editor. If a newer version of that exists the supports NTFS, try that. It may be possible to delete the partition on the clone and then use TESTDISK or another recovery util to try to rebuild the partition. A bootable XPE CD and Avast! Disk checker might work. Using a disk editor, even old Norton in physical disk mode, may be the only way, searching for bad directory entries with no starting cluster listed and recording their locations, then going further into the disk to find the actual good subdirectories, and going back and replacing the bad entries with good names and good starting clusters.

The pain would lie in figuring out the cluster number. If you have at least one good root directory entry that lists a starting cluster, and you can find its corresponding directory data on the disk, then you can get a physical sector to cluster offset. It looks like there is enough information in the directory list there to get the number of sectors per cluster from some utility like Acronis, and once you have that you can figure the offset to determine the correct cluster number of the good directory entries. If Windows is listed in the root, search for the system32 directory entry further into the disk, it should be physically close to the root. I may be corrected here, this logic is valid for FAT32, but perhaps not for NTFS. Thankfully I've never had to do this on NTFS.

My best and undeniable accurate advice is to work on a clone, not the original.

Hi,

Just solved this.

The problem was on the first directory's after some checking could find all the files.


Thanks

Programs that might help: Active Partition recovery, Active Uneraser, Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro, Winternals Disk Commander, DiyDataRecovery Diskpatch, Prosoft Media Tools. Use one that requires you to copy the files off the clone to a third disk.