Corrupted master file table

[EvilCabal]

Hi,

I have a Western Digital Caviar WD1600JB HD, 2 months old. The drive is set up with 2 NTFS 80G partition, D and E. For no reason, after a reboot, I got a disk drive failure error on the drive. My OS is on another HD so after some playing around I managed to get the computer to dectect de drive and boot up.

However, windows decteted 4 partitions insteand of 2 and I could not access any of those. I got errors like "Cannot access E, invalid parameter" or "The drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now?".

Now I managed to get my D partition back by running several chkdsk (for some reason it took more than one...). But (obviously), my data is all on the other partition, the E drive...

I tried to chkdsk it, got a "Corrupt master file table. CHKDSK aborted." error.

I also tried a deep SuperScan with Active@ Data Recovery. It found 4 partitions, my D, 2 small Dos partition (probably stuff left from the testing at Western Digital) and a 132 G Fat32 partition full of senseless data (Folders and files of variable sizes (30 to 600) with unreadable names). My data partition, E (80G NTFS) is not found...

I really want my data back, I had a lot of personnal pictures, music compositions and programs source codes, plus a lot of stuff that I need for my job... What else should I try?

Thanks for the help!

Fred

 

[EvilCabal]

It seems I can get most of my data back using runtime GetDataBack for NTFS 2.31. The recovery process is very slow but it works (at least for the files I've tried yet). I think most of the stuff is there, some folders have disapeared but what was in them can be found under other folders with a wierd name like [00156].

Anyway, this software is great but I'd still like to know what went wrong...