NTFS Recovery Tactics

[Peahippo]

I work in a bank, and losing data even once-in-a-blue-moon is not acceptable. Tantalizingly, our Windows XP machines fail in a range of recoverable ways.

Today, I have a machine with a 20GB IDE HDD that has 2 partitions: 0 is FAT32 (1GB, for holding the source files for drivers, etc.), and 1 is NTFS (all the remaining space, for the running OS).

This particular machine crashed on the user, claiming that the XP loader couldn't find PCI.SYS. In cases similar to this previously, I'd run the Windows XP Setup disks (WinXP_EN_PRO_BF.EXE if you can find it), copied over the necessary file from thumbdrive, and restored the system's ability to boot. In contrast, for simple data recovery, I had put the HDD into another XP machine machine and then inspected the added NTFS partition for files.

Not this time, however. XP thinks there is a partition, but considers it unformatted. Hence, I have a damaged NTFS partition.

Well, I'm currently running ZAR32 (Zero Access Recovery) version 7.3.0, and it's taking a gawd-awfully long time to process. I suspect that ZAR32 is going to fail to recover the partition.

What would you do in this case to attempt to repair the NTFS partition? Given the state of the damage, even a lossy repair is much, much better than nothing.

 

[Freestone]

Perhaps you could try an alternative recovery program if ZAR32 fails. There has been much reported success by forum members using GetDataBack:

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

In your case, you'd want the version for NTFS.

 

[JimInKS]

Gibson Research has a product Spinrite 6 that they claim can perform "miracles". I have NO first hand experience with it but you might want to give it a try.

http://www.grc.com

 

[mainegeek]

I use "GetDataBack" regularly with great succes.

 

[Peahippo]

Well, ZAR32 hung at 18% of step 1 (of 4). In contrast, the log claims it stopped processing at about 47 hours.

I downloaded GetDataBack and will try it. Thanks.

 

[JimInKS]

Well, ironically I had a chance to try out Spinrite 6 today.
Had an XP sp2 machine that would get about halfway throught the boot process and then reboot. Machine is only about 3 months old. Same symptoms for Normal, Safe, and Last Good configuration.

I payed my $89 to GRC, downloaded Spinrite 6, made bootable CD, and ran the level 2 recovery. It took about 30 min to process a 10G ntfs partion. It repaired a few sectors and reported that at least 1 was not repairable. After it was complete I booted into XP. Xp reported that the registry file was damaged (not sure of the exact message) and automatically used a backup copy. Everything seems fine now. Thats 1 for 1.