I am trying to recover an ntfs partition with linux. Windows will not show the files on this drive, the drive letter appears, but when clicking on it, windows informs me the drive needs to be formated.

On windows bootup, checkdisk scans the drive and shows the missing files names as it scans.

Fdisk output on this drive shows the partition as existing:

Start End Blocks ID System
1 9729 78148161 7 HPFS/NTFS

When i attempt to mount the drive with
mount -r -t ntfs /dev/hdd /mnt/tmp
I get the error:
Bad superblock, or unrecognised filesystem.

My kernel does have ntfs support and will mount other drives/partitions.


Can anyone point me in the direction of a methodology to recover this partition. Any analysis's of the problem would also be appreciated.

Thanks guys
Mitch

Use your XP install CD in Recovery mode. Check out FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, CHKDSK, and I believe there are a few other helpful ones. In fact, earlier today, FIXBOOT completely saved me from all but giving up on getting hda to mount Turns out I had accidentally wiped the boot partition with the grub commandline, but that command took care of it

Wouldn't that be
mount -ro -t ntfs /dev/hdd /mnt/tmp
as in /etc/fstab?

Sorry, no other idea. I have a comparable problem with NTFS, I recently had to rebuild my system using the same partitions. For some reason WinNT can see F: but can't read my data from it. SuSE can, though, so nothing's lost -- except for the fact that SuSE crashes since yesterday after trying to mount /dev/hdb8 and goes into rescue mode ... but that's a different story .

Actually, wouldn't that be
mount -ro -t ntfs /dev/hdd1 /mnt/tmp

yep, sorry typo in my post

Actually I have figured out that the MFT is corrupt and so is the backup apparantly. I have no idea how this was done, as it is a friends drive, but needless to say it must have taken some talent to get it in this state.

I think I need a utility that will scan for the start of files on the drive, and pull of as much off as it can. And it needs to be free.