Recovering a lost hard drive

[weberm]

I am running a machine with Win XP and two hard drives. The master drive (C) contains software and the slave drive (D) is used to store data and set as "My Documents". Earlier this week I had the misfortune of encountering several brownouts, courtesy of tropical storm Fay, after which my PC told me it lost the drive. Looking at My Documents revealed that although the "My Documents" folder was there on the D: drive, the subdirectories had been wiped out. The task bar prompted me to run something to fix it, but by the time I found something to take notes, the message went away. It looked like CHKDSK, so I ran it withe the /f parameter from the command prompt, but it didn't seem to work.

I used a file recovery program on my PC and it seemed to find the mssing files and directories fine (and, of course, a bunch of useless missing chains), but I don't see way to restore them. Well, I could restore them on the C drive and them move them to the D, but surely there's a way to rebuild/restore them on the D drive (where they seem to be taking up space), right?

 

[BadBigBen]

Q: How do I repair a corrupt master file table?

A: It rarely happens that MFT becomes corrupted. NTFS stores a copy of MFT that is called MFT mirror. If problem occurs, NTFS tries to synchronize these copies.

You can try to run Check Disk utility from Windows environment. Or if Windows is not bootable, boot from floppies or bootable CD-ROM to Recovery Console and run CHKDSK utility that could help you.

If the damage to MFT is serious, standard utilities might help you and you'll see "Drive cannot be accessed" message when trying to access the drive in Windows Explorer. In this case we recommend you to use third party software, like Active@ UNERASER for DOS or Active@ File Recovery for Windows to access and save your files to another drive, and then reformat the partition.

source: NTFS.com

Try running the CHKDSK /R from the Recovery Console instead...

How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[weberm]

Thanks! Apparently, when I ran CHKDSK it saved the directories and files to an invisible directory named something like FOUND.000, so I had to open the command prompt and manually move them back to their proper place because they didn't appear in explorer.

 

[BadBigBen]

Show Hidden Program or System Files

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/hiddenfiles.mspx

for future reference... glad you found the files though...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

 

[weberm]

Hmm, that option was already set...