Mount Corrupted NTFS Partition Under Linux
 

First, sorry if this question was asked/answered earlier, but the search function wasn't working for me when I posted it. Also, sorry if this should be in another forum. Now to the question.

I have a 200GB Maxtor SATA hard drive (NTFS partition taking the whole drive) on which the NTFS System Volume Information is corrupted, and Windows can't read it. Can this drive be mounted under Linux and the data (in theory) recovered?

Thanks everyone.

PS - What confuses me is that I mounted both this drive and another drive (160GB WD SATA same setup as above) in Linux, but only this drive has had any problems at all. The other drive is fine (thus far).

Nevermind, I found out that I can't. I tried to get into the files using Knoppix, but it didn't work. So now I gotta find another solution. I know this isn't Linux related, but does anyone know of any software that can recover the data even though the System Volume Information is totally FUBAR? It can be *NIX or Windows, preferably Windows (I know that's a bad thing).

You might try Norton Utilities to repair it. However if this is where the Windows system is installed to, I don't know if partition repair is available when booting off of the Norton Utedlities installation disk. If you are trying to recover text files, you can read the the entire drive as a single file. For example /dev/sdb rather than /dev/sdb1. Then you could perhaps use split so that you have reasonably sized parts to work with. Using grep might help locate some files.

You may be better off finding forensic tools, designed for NTFS which probably run on windows. Install this drive as an extra drive (such as D:) first. This may entail installing XP on a new drive so you have a running system, or installing the drive on another computer.

It's not my boot drive. It's all file storage with sizes ranging from a couple KB all the way up to almost 5GB. I just want to recover as many of the files intact that I can. I do have backups of some in various places, but I'm not totally sure about the integrity of the backups (could have been bad burns, etc.).