NTFS rebuild software

kriscamaro68

Does anyone know of software that will rebuild the ntfs file structure on a drive and is free.

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tiersten

Why? What happened to it?

I don't know of any free software that will do it though. The only one I knew of was to fix the very specific issues caused by the early Linux NTFS driver and that got taken down once everybody moved onto a replacement driver which wasn't broken.

kriscamaro68

tiersten wrote: »

Why? What happened to it?

I don't know of any free software that will do it though. The only one I knew of was to fix the very specific issues caused by the early Linux NTFS driver and that got taken down once everybody moved onto a replacement driver which wasn't broken.

It seems that the drive cannot be read by any computer but it is recognized in the bios. I am wanting to try to rebuild the file structure unless you know of some other way to recover the data. I have tried r-recovery studio which does not read the drive but recognizes the drive. Any ideas would be great.

dynamik

Wow, if R-Studio isn't doing it for you, you're probably hosed. That's fantastic software that I use all the time.

tiersten

kriscamaro68 wrote: »

It seems that the drive cannot be read by any computer but it is recognized in the bios.

What do you mean by can't be read? It isn't recognised by the OS or you literally can't read anything without it erroring out? If you can't actually read anything at all then this software isn't going to help and a data recovery company is pretty much your only hope at getting the data back.

kriscamaro68

tiersten wrote: »

What do you mean by can't be read? It isn't recognised by the OS or you literally can't read anything without it erroring out? If you can't actually read anything at all then this software isn't going to help and a data recovery company is pretty much your only hope at getting the data back.

The drive can been seen by the os and also r-studio but it doesn't see any data on the drive. (it thinks its a blank drive) When I try to access the drive through the os in explorer it says it needs to be formatted. There are no noises that make me think that its a hardware issue with the drive but it could be the controller on the drive but if that where the case how come the os detects the drive? Kinda weird. I had used some software a few years back that would try to rebuild the ntfs file structure or atleast thats what it said it was doing and it worked a few times on drives that had similar problems. Either way I think the data is gone and will probably have to let the user know.

tiersten

kriscamaro68 wrote: »

The drive can been seen by the os and also r-studio but it doesn't see any data on the drive. (it thinks its a blank drive) When I try to access the drive through the os in explorer it says it needs to be formatted. There are no noises that make me think that its a hardware issue with the drive but it could be the controller on the drive but if that where the case how come the os detects the drive? Kinda weird. I had used some software a few years back that would try to rebuild the ntfs file structure or atleast thats what it said it was doing and it worked a few times on drives that had similar problems. Either way I think the data is gone and will probably have to let the user know.

Image the drive and then work on the backup before you try anything else. If Windows and R-Studio both don't recognise it as a valid filesystem then it is pretty badly corrupted.

If you've lost the NTFS manifest then it is going to be extremely difficult and painful to recover files because you have to trawl through the entire disk looking for sections of your files.

Point them at the various data recovery companies and tell them to be shocked by the prices.

Asif Dasl

Sometimes a drive shows up as 32Mb and even drive recovery software cannot recover files from the drive - the software only sees 32Mb and not the rest of the drive, which could be 2Tb! This is an error with the drive and is OS independent. I have seen it happen a few times, I hear a lot with Gigabyte boards.

Use a HDAT2 boot disk to do a 'Set Max Address' to fix the corrupt LBA size, then reboot the system and check to see if you can see the missing NTFS filesystem in Windows. If neccessary re-run the drive recovery software, but if it is a corrupt LBA drive size then it should be fixed right away.

It's worth a boot of HDAT2 to see if the LBA size is correct or not anyway.