File system screwed up, how to recover?

[Kazmir25]

Hi.
For whatever reason, one of my machines froze while Windows XP booted. I rebooted and got the messages that scandisk found errors on one of my drives (all are NTFS). So I let the recovery run through, this happened a couple of times with a few files and Windows fixed it no problem.

Well not this time... the recovery ran for a long time, it's a 200 GB drive filled with TV Show caps (VCD/SVCD). Now about half of my files are broken, they display random stuff from other files (I start an episode of West Wing and instead it shows a mix of Alias and 24...). So I guess the file information points to the wrong data chunks???

How can I fix that? I tried several data recovery progs but they don't "know" anything is wrong with those files.
I hope somebody can help me out, I wnt my collection back

 

[CVic]

Aaah, I had the exact same problem one year ago.
I had two 80 GB disks in a RAID system. Something went wrong, I believe it was Partition Magic that did this.
I also had a lot of tv caps just like you. I tried some of the most known recovery programs but with no luck.
I still have not used my two 80 GB discs after that.
I still hope that there is a solution to this...
But nobody except me has replied to your post :/

 

[willykz]

I've never worked with NTFS, but know a lot about the FAT32
file system, and at the level your system is messed up they
are probably conceptually similar. Sorry if you know all
this, but lets see.

From what you say the directory is ok, ie still lists all
your files, but the data in the files is scrambled.
Each directory entry points to a disk cluster (group
of physical sectors on the disk) that cluster (or
a table somewhere that maps to the cluster) points to
the next cluster in the file until you hit an end of
file mark. Some of the pointers are cross linked to
the wrong files. It would be possible to write a program
to correct this, maybe there are some out there. The
problem is even after you have this program it would be
very labor intensive to do the correction cause I see
no good way to automate the recovery. You would have
to find each discontinuity, figure out what it was supposed
to link to instead of what it is, then find that and set
the link.

I know nothing about how TV programs are stored on disk,
but if you are really lucky the records include some identifing data which would allow you to automate correcting
the links. However I'm afraid its a big job...

I bet the easiest thing is to get a film editing program
and cut and past the various segments back together in
new files. That gives you a good idea of how labor intensive this is.

Sorry.

 

[SYAR2003]

A tip !
There has been lots of strange things
happening with extended partitions.
Use primary partitions when partitioning.
Upto four pri partitions can bee handled .

On a single hard disk, you can have up to four primary partitions or three primary partitions and one extended partition.
Within an extended partition, you can create unlimited additional subdivisions called logical partitions .