MFT recovery using Testdisk?

Zapho

Guys,
I've been fixing a mate of mine's hdd, which is in pretty bad condition. The drive is littered with bad sectors and can't be read through explorer or cmd in windows. (Windows thinks the partition is RAW, accessing it through cmd gives a CRC error).

However, I've had a lot of success recovering files using testdisk and photorec. Testdisk can actually give me a list of files from the MFT (and I can copy files from it) but when I ask it repair the MFT it fails.

Does anybody know anyway I can repair the MFT at all using Testdisk or whatever really? It would make the recovery a lot faster for me!

Cheers,
-Zapho

Capt'n Midnight

If the drive has bad sectors , try and clone it first then do the repair on the copy.

If the bad sectors are an indication of a failing drive then it will die, the only question is when. Use hdtune to see what smart says.


you can use ddrescue in linux to copy to a file and mount it as a loop device and try to fix it.


Backup up the partition table first then get testdisk to restore the partition,if you can't read it check what other options / hdd geometries it gives you

you could use fixmbr / fixboot but wouldn't give much hope , try a windows boot disk ( formatted disk with ntdetect.com , boot.ini and ntldr on it )


If one of the bad sectors is at the start of the drive where the partition table resides then game over , HDTUNE can be used to run a surfce scan , this will get the drive to remap bad sectors , but the remapped ones will be a lot slower since the head will have to all the way to the centre of the disk to pick up them, if you are lucky it may help , only do after you have recoverd all the vital data

Zapho

Thanks for the advice Capt'n!

I've managed to pull a lot of the data of the drive already today, but it was a bit of a pain in the ass, and I'm missing a lot of the filenames, however, the data is intact.

I'll give ddrescue a shot, best that I have a working image to play with rather than a dead drive.

I'd actually completely forgotten about fixmbr. Although, your right, the bad sectors are very near the start of the drive, the first occurs at sector #1400, so I could be screwed here.

I've never heard of HDTUNE but its worth a look. If it can help me recover the MFT, it would be excellent! Isn't there always a back up copy of the MFT on the drive? I know there's always a backup copy of the boot record, why not MFT?

Capt'n Midnight

hdtune is just HDD diagnostics , no data recovery