On 9 Jan 2010, at 16:49, Peter Humphrey wrote:
On Saturday 09 January 2010 12:34:26 Mick wrote:
...
It resets the ntfs journal and when the drive is booted into
MSWindows
it'll run a chkdsk - make sure you do not interrupt this!
The disk in question is an external USB disk.
In your friend's case you can force a chkdsk by right-clicking on the
drive in Windows Explorer/Properties/Tools/Error-checking.
The only Windows system I can run at the moment is on my laptop; as
soon as
I plug the disk in I get a BSoD, so that's no help.
I _believe_ that if you leave the USB drive, with the corrupt
filesystem, plugged in when the laptop boots, then during the boot
process the `chkdsk` will be performed.
I was not aware of `ntfsfix`, and have been of the opinion that the
best way to repair a corrupt NTFS filesystem was to use `chkdsk`, this
being MS's own tool for the job. If the `chkdsk` does indeed run
during boot, I would probably do a second one, just to be sure. If you
initiate `chkdsk` at the command line, instead of using the UI as
described by Mick, you get some extra options. `chkdsk /?`
Other than that I think we're into a file recovery mode involving
tools
like photorec and dd_rescue.
Photorec is what I've used to extract a few thousand files - the
ones I
mentioned with the unhelpful names. Maybe dd_rescue will help.
The problem with dd_rescue (GNU ddrescue is better, if I am
remembering the underscore spelling correctly) is that it will produce
an exact image of the disk, with the filesystem intact and (in your
case) still corrupt. However you might use this as a backup image of
your starting point, to give you multiple chances at repairing the fs
using different approaches.
Stroller.
