Arch Linux

jakerules

Member

Registered: 2011-04-14

Posts: 34

Recovering files from a corrupted NTFS? Is it possible?

Hey guys,

Last night I decided to finally give into my urges and install Arch Linux (as a dual boot option)
I had to shrink my windows 7 volume in order to give Arch some space, so I used the default windows tool for that.

This is where I messed up. Being somewhat of a noob, I had to manually configure my Arch partitions. I'm pretty sure I messed up the windows mbr, because I cringed when I saw that I accidently did something to my sda1 and sda2. Besides that, everything was going good. I had netcfg to run automatically, Firefox was up and running on LXDE and such. So then I decided to go back into Windows to see if the dual boot worked, and it came out with some sort of MBR error. So this has happened in the past with my Ubuntu days, and I used the windows 7 dvd to fixmbr and fixboot. I knew it was going to delete grub, but I had supergrubdisk ready. Well, then it gave me the dreaded disk read error press ctrl + alt + del to restart. :x So, I supergrubdisked and supergrub gave me a bunch of errors. Found stage1 and fixed menu.lst.

Now I'm doing fine on Arch and I love it personally. Thinking of switching to a more eyecandy-looking desktop environment, but I really love how fast lxde is and how much power you can have over a system.

But enough of my introduction post, I'm trying to strip the data from my old windows 7 partition that is probably corrupt. I have ntfs-3g going and I managed to mount the recovery options (accidently), but whenever I attempt to mount the actual partition I get a weird error. Here is the part of fdisk where my windows is.

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2   *      206848   106942463    53367808    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

And here is the error.

NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/sda2': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sda2' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

Am I boned? I have some fairly important information on there I don't want to lose, but if I messed up then I messed up. : (

shulamy

Member

From: israel

Registered: 2010-09-11

Posts: 454

Re: Recovering files from a corrupted NTFS? Is it possible?

you can try testdisk but i think you will have to install arch again.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

ezik

Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: Recovering files from a corrupted NTFS? Is it possible?

Also try photorec in combination with testdisk

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