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I've used search, but none of the results match my problem so I didn't have to ask separate question.

I've Installed Windows 7 RTM recently and since then partitions located on one of my HDDs have gone "crazy". They used to "freeze" and didn't open in explorer for some time (minute or two, usually), sometimes all partitions of the drive wouldn't show until reboot and finally, one of those partitions started showing "disk structure is corrupted and unreadable" warning, it appeared in Disk Management window as RAW and chkdsk showed "mft corrupt".

There were no important data on the partition and I didn't have enough time to analyze the problem at the moment, so I just reformatted it and ran antivirus scan on system.

After that problem settled for some time, but yesterday the problematic HDD vanished again from the system. After reboot chkdsk identified mft of four partitions corrupt and now they are all in same conditions as the above mentioned one. But the difference is that the files stored in them are extremely important.

and just for info: I upgraded from Win7 build 7077, but had some performance issues, so I reformatted system drive and installed fresh Win7 RTM on it.

I've downloaded TestDisk and it shows all the partitions marked as NTFS (not RAW) and my knowledge of the program wasn't sufficient to obtain any other info from it :-)

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I'm interested, is there a way to let me restore the MFT or just access files so I can backup them before reformatting the drive.

Thanks for your time. :)

P.S. my reformatted drive is showing no problems, could there be a problem with windows 7 itself? I googled, but with no results.

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Images not accessible. – harrymc Sep 14 '09 at 11:57
@harrymc you just need to take out the space after the // – Col Sep 23 '09 at 9:24
Fixed the images. – Gareth Aug 20 '11 at 6:39
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

You could use something like testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk to try and fix it or any data recovery tool that can scan the disk directly without using the mft like the tools from here http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1 this will be very slow however.

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Col, That you so much! PC Inspector's software did well in recovering things, though the process was waaay too slow - it took some 3 days for a 30 GB drive to recover just AVI files (and lots of them were severely damaged due to drive fragmentation). Thanks again. – domen Sep 23 '09 at 9:12
Glad I could help sorry you couldn't recover more of your data though. If it's vital you could try a professional data recovery specialist but it might get expensive. – Col Sep 23 '09 at 9:26
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up vote 0 down vote

The disk is going bad. Replace it.

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