Is it possible to backup the MFT in Windows? - NTFS

Question

I experienced my first crashed Hard Drive a few days back, luckily it was not the primary disk and was just full of software which I could reinstall on.

I tried several utilities like

• Easeus Partition Wizard - www.easeus.com/
• TestDisk - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

To try and save my hard drive partition however they could not fix it.

I had to reformat the disk as the MFT (Master File Table) got corrupted and Windows chkdsk could not find the backup for it.

I was wondering how I can locate this MFT and back it up on a seperate location, say one of my other hard drives.

I am not using RAID

Disks are SATAII

Is it possible, how can I prevent a crashed disk in future?

Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

Not really an answer to your question, but NTFSInfo can at least tell you the clusters where the MFT is located:

Maybe that's a start. But even if you extract the MFT, I have a hard time coming up with an idea on how to make use of it at a later time. I agree with jdh that a full backup would most likely be the best solution as that will make it a lot easier to recover from a failure.

Answer 2

A full disk imaging tool would be a better solution for this situation. Tools like Acronois, Symantec Ghost or System Restore in Windows 7. These tools make a compressed image of the entire partition and/or drive, which can be restored from a bootable CD if the entire original drive is lost. Depending on the tool, they have the ability to backup deltas (and I think limited individual file restore?). Having a regular schedule to make backup images and store a copy remotely, is a great plan.