You are not logged in.

#1 2010-05-02 03:29:08

Flay
Member
Registered: 2009-09-22
Posts: 7

damaged NTFS drive

i was running "grub-install /dev/..."
and accidentally typed the wrong thing, telling it to install grub on my NTFS storage drive with all my data on it.
now, whenever i try to mount the disk, i get

Unexpected clusters per mft record (-128).
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.

i tried using Photorec on the disk, i stopped it after a few minutes into the scan to see how it was working, and found it had extracted many of my files, all unorganized though.
if this is my only option, i currently don't have enough working disk space to restore all of the lost data to though, or enough time to sift through the data to interpret it all

so if the file system can still be saved, what should i do?

edit: after running ntfsfix, it suggested running chkdsk. So i booted off a windows installation disk and chose R for recovery, and ran chkdsk, and it said there were one or more unrecoverable errors.
So should i just give up restoring the file system and just try to use photorec to recover the few important files that were on my disk?

Last edited by Flay (2010-05-02 04:10:19)

Offline

#2 2010-05-02 04:44:25

cesura
Package Maintainer (PM)
From: Tallinn, Estonia
Registered: 2010-01-23
Posts: 1,867

Re: damaged NTFS drive

I have no idea how reliable this is, but:
http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsck
may be able to determine how bad this is and we can try and go from there

Offline

#3 2010-05-02 05:10:13

Flay
Member
Registered: 2009-09-22
Posts: 7

Re: damaged NTFS drive

Thanks for the reply

the site says 'ntfsck is not yet available'
and to instead use 'ntfsresize -fi /dev/hdXY' or windows chkdsk
after doing so, i got

Failed to startup volume: Invalid argument.
ERROR(22): Opening '/dev/sdb1' as NTFS failed: Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't have a valid NTFS.

and i had already run windows chkdsk earlier

Offline

#4 2010-05-02 05:27:04

kaizoku
Member
Registered: 2009-01-09
Posts: 62

Re: damaged NTFS drive

It seems you've only overwritten the mbr, try testdisk to restore the partition table, it saved me a few times.

Last edited by kaizoku (2010-05-02 05:42:32)

Offline

#5 2010-05-02 14:55:08

dmartins
Member
Registered: 2006-09-23
Posts: 360

Re: damaged NTFS drive

What device name did you pass to grub exactly? Was it /dev/sdb, or /dev/sdb1?

Offline

#6 2010-05-02 17:01:22

Flay
Member
Registered: 2009-09-22
Posts: 7

Re: damaged NTFS drive

i tried using testdisk to restore the partition table, and after it wrote the partition table onto the disk, i still had the same problems

i passed /dev/sdb1 to grub

Offline

#7 2010-05-02 19:03:16

dmartins
Member
Registered: 2006-09-23
Posts: 360

Re: damaged NTFS drive

In that case, your partition table was probably fine. It is stored in the first 512 bytes of the drive and grub-install shouldn't hurt it anyways! See if this helps: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-194340.html

Offline

#8 2010-05-02 19:21:34

cesura
Package Maintainer (PM)
From: Tallinn, Estonia
Registered: 2010-01-23
Posts: 1,867

Re: damaged NTFS drive

As dmartins said, the MBR is the first 512-byte sector at the very beginning of the hard drive. It should have only damaged the first 512 bytes.

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB