Need help repairing NTFS partition

[Slayer offline]

Hey, i have a 120 gig IDE external hard drive with a copy of a 120 gig SATA drive on it that some how got corrupt and is being blamed on me and i was given the job of fixing it but i have no idea how. Has any one got any knowledge of any software or anything like that that could repair the NTFS file system?

[Jeremified offline]

Try chkdsk, for starters.

[Slayer offline]

Yeah that was my first idea but the damn computer is picking it up as a unknown partition, Linux doesn't even pick it up and because Microsoft are stingy mac cant write to it.

[TheAppleFreak]

If you were attempting to write to it, you might want to try Paragon's NTFS-3G. It's a read-write filesystem for OS X; only problem is, I don't know how well it is when it comes to recovering data. You might want to search around for either free- or trialware; demo- and crippleware would only force you to pay money for something you'll prolly use only once.

[TheLQ offline]

You can try to see if it mounts in Ubuntu Linux, it has that NTFS-3G driver nativity. Linux has alot of weird commands that can repair partions. You can also try googling around for ntfs partion recovery.

[Jazzy Josh offline]

Dante: by not picking it up do you mean not mounting it, or is in not listed as a partition in /dev/ ?

If the block device is listed, there should be some command to re-write the partiton headers of the NTFS partition, but I can think of any right now, unless mkntfs has a mode for that.

Definitely try the above options first, try to save the data. if you can recover the drive without losing all of the data, then great, you don't have to worry, but if it doesn't at least you should have some sort of backup to rely on.

[TheLQ offline]

hang on a sec, you said that one drive was a copy of the other right? So why not recreate the partition and recopy everything? Much simpler than partition recovery

[Slayer offline]

@Lyoko is cool, yeah it wont mount.

@Lord.Quackstar it is a copy of the other drive after it was made un-readable.

And now my own note, im trying to make an image of it so that i can just tinker with that with out any chance of loss of data. That way if i find something that works i can do that to the drive.

[TheLQ offline]

OMG

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ntfs+partition+recovery
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ntfs+file+recovery

Please click those links

I also found http://www.dtidata.com/ntfs_partition_repair.htm, might be very helpful.

And good luck trying to manage a 120 GB raw image file. I would first look into cloning/mirroring instead of trying to manage that

[Slayer offline]

OMG

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ntfs+partition+recovery
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ntfs+file+recovery

And good luck trying to manage a 120 GB raw image file. I would first look into cloning/mirroring instead of trying to manage that

I tried both of them on the image i made and i have a terabyte drive that only has been partitioned for 500 gig so i got more than enough room