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From: Szakacsits S. <sz...@si...> - 2003-07-20 17:46:34
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On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Joshua Kwan wrote: > So yesterday, thanks to a Win98 large disk blunder, I wiped out the > first half gigabyte or so of my Windows XP partition. Luckily, I was > able to boot with a MS-DOS floppy and run this trialware program which > told me that my data was safe (supposedly.) It was able to mount the > corrupt NTFS partition and read the directory structure. However, being > trialware it didn't allow me to save it. XP starts filling the partition usually from 3 GB (said to be because of performance reasons) so probably you only wiped out the boot sector. This is also stored in the last sector (last 512 bytes) of the partition. Just copy it to the partition beginning and that's all. The process was detailed sometimes in the NTFS Help/Open discussion forums, maybe it's even in the FAQ? If not, probably it should be ... You could also try 'fixboot' using Windows Recovery Console. BTW, most Linux kernel has problem reading the last sector of a partition in cases (man mkntfs and see BUGS part), in this case you should calculate its place on the disk and copy from there. > I started wondering if the Linux NTFS driver supports recovery of this > sort. I'm pretty sure that demo program was reading from the backup MFT, > and if I can just restore that and the valid NTFS signature so I can > mount it in Knoppix, I can pluck all of the important files away and > reinstall from scratch. I don't think the MFT got damaged because that would cause much serious damage. $MFTMirr doesn't really have so much useful info that 0.5GB could be recovered. Szaka |
