"The File or Directory Is Corrupt"

[jeparham]

I have a 120GB WD hard drive on the Primary IDE controller in my PC. I use
cable select jumper settings, and this drive is connected to the secondary
connector on the IDE cable.

On the drive I have a 30GB primary partition (Drive F and a 90GB extended
partition. There are 3 30GB logical drives inside the extended partition
(Drives G:, H:, and I.

The file system on is NTFS.

Suddenly I cannot access the 30GB primary partition. Each time I get "F: is
not accessible. The file or directory is corrupt." Drives G,H and I all
perform as usual.

Disk Management in Windows XP shows the drive as "Healthy (Active)"

I have ran the Recovery Console, and using the DIR command I can see the
files and directories still on the drive. I've ran FIXMBR and it reports:

**Caution***
This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record.
FIXMBR may damage your partition tables if you proceed.
This could cause all the partitions on the current hard disk to become
inaccessible.
If you are not having problems accessing your drive do not continue.
Are you sure you want to write a new MBR

I let it go ahead and "fix" the MBR, but when I go back into Windows, it
still cannot find anything on the F: drive and gives me the same error.

Any ideas what I can try next? I've got about 18GB of now inaccessible data
on the drive, so I would prefer to not reformat the drive.

Thanks

 

[_Vanguard_]

"jeparham" <[email protected]>
wrote in

Disk Management in Windows XP shows the drive as "Healthy (Active)"

I have ran the Recovery Console, and using the DIR command I can see
the files and directories still on the drive. I've ran FIXMBR and it
reports:

<snip>

You never mentioned if you ran "chkdsk /r F:".

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[jeparham]

Oops. In trying to be as thorough in my description as possible, I
overlooked the very first steps.

Yes, I ran

chkdsk f: /f and I ran chkdsk f: /r

Nada. It reported no errors in either of the scans, and therefore made no
repairs or recoveries.

I also forgot to mention that I also tried uninstalling the drive in Control
Panel and then doing a reboot to let Windows "find" it again. No good, I
get the same error. I also booted up in Safe Mode - Command Prompt Only,
and it will not read the F: drive that way either.

I still cannot understand why I can see the files and folders in the
Recovery Console but not from inside Windows. I do know that I'd give Bill
Gates a dollar if I could run XCOPY from the Recovery Console though.

 

[_Vanguard_]

Oops. In trying to be as thorough in my description as possible, I
overlooked the very first steps.

Yes, I ran

chkdsk f: /f and I ran chkdsk f: /r

Nada. It reported no errors in either of the scans, and therefore
made no repairs or recoveries.

I also forgot to mention that I also tried uninstalling the drive in
Control Panel and then doing a reboot to let Windows "find" it again.
No good, I get the same error. I also booted up in Safe Mode -
Command Prompt Only, and it will not read the F: drive that way
either.

I still cannot understand why I can see the files and folders in the
Recovery Console but not from inside Windows. I do know that I'd
give Bill Gates a dollar if I could run XCOPY from the Recovery
Console though.

Can you open a DOS shell (aka Command Prompt) to list files and
directories using a 'dir' command rather than trying to use the Explorer
GUI program? Then you aren't listing all the files and directories at
once. Then try using 'notepad <file>' to see if you can successfully
open the files, and use 'cd' to see if you can navigate under each
directory from the root.

In Disk Management, use the Action -> Rescan menu to make sure all
drives have a unique signature in the MBR. What file system and disk
type are listed for F: in Disk Management in the upper list pane?

You don't have a computer, like an IBM Thinkpad, or security software
that password protects a drive, do you?

 

[jeparham]

No. If Windows has booted into Safe Mode - Command Prompt Only, Safe Mode
or Normal Mode, I cannot access the drive using a DIR command from a command
window.

The drive is listed as having an NTFS and as a "Basic" disk type. I tried
rescan and nothing appeared to change.

I don't have any security issues that I am aware of. It's a tower PC and I
am the only one who uses it.

I ran across some software called GetBackData For NTFS that seems to be able
to do what I need. I downloaded a trial version and ran it and it's
indicating that it can recover everything on the "bad partition". I think
I'll go ahead and pony up the $79 for it and see if it can recover the data
or not.

 

[_Vanguard_]

No. If Windows has booted into Safe Mode - Command Prompt Only, Safe
Mode or Normal Mode, I cannot access the drive using a DIR command
from a command window.

The drive is listed as having an NTFS and as a "Basic" disk type. I
tried rescan and nothing appeared to change.

I don't have any security issues that I am aware of. It's a tower PC
and I am the only one who uses it.

I ran across some software called GetBackData For NTFS that seems to
be able to do what I need. I downloaded a trial version and ran it
and it's indicating that it can recover everything on the "bad
partition". I think I'll go ahead and pony up the $79 for it and see
if it can recover the data or not.

<snip>

Check if the GetBackData program has a satisfaction guarantee (so you
get a refund if it doesn't do what it claims). The Symantec products do
and I have returned two of them and got refunded when they did not
perform as I needed based on their claims. I haven't used GetBackData.
It seems more oriented to recovering deleted or lost files, even due to
MFT or MBR corruption, rather than recovering the partition (so you
don't have to recover the files, just recover the partition they are
in).

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/ has
free downloads of some utilities from Powerquest, now owned by Symantec.
The partinfo.zip file has their DOS-mode partition table information
utility but you have to run it from a DOS partition, like a DOS-bootable
floppy (i.e., it won't run under Windows NT/2K/XP). I have the Windows
version that comes with PartitionMagic which will do some checking on
the partitions and show you their definitions, so I'm assuming the
DOS-mode partinfo.exe utility might provide the same checks and info.
There is also partition table editor utility (ptedit.zip) but be very
careful with it as you are directly editing the partition tables on the
drive. I have used it when I accidentally deleted the wrong partition,
recreated that partition in its same place (since everything is still
physically there except the entry in the partition table), but the
partition type wasn't defined (which gets done during a format), so I
did a Google search on partition types, found the value that I needed
for NTFS, and used PTEDIT to change it from an unknown/undefined
partition type to NTFS. However, you said Disk Management said this
partition was NTFS so it doesn't look to be an invalid or undefined
partition type in the partition table entry for your 30GB primary
partition.

I have PartitionMagic and use its partition tools. The Ranish Partition
Manager (http://www.ranish.com/) is free but I haven't tried it. The
VirtualLab program (http://www.binarybiz.com/vlab/) is free but there is
a cost to use their recovery server; see http://snipurl.com/8ect.
However, if you are not using their remote save service but instead use
another local hard drive, I don't know if they charge you anything since
your saved files are stored locally. I'm sure they understand their
concept of quota but their definition is ambiguous. Could be when you
use their server and not when saving locally. Could be they detect for
free, like GetBackYourData, but charge you to actually have the program
do any actual processing to recover the files. Looks like they want to
do the latter and rob you royally; see http://snipurl.com/8ed3.
However, VirtualLab got a high user rating at download.com (but only 43
votes is a bit small), and the 2 negative votes are irrelevant to the
product's quality. Ontrack, a data recovery company, has their
EasyRecovery DataRecovery product but it costs $199 (you can download it
for free to have it check if it will work for you, just like
GetBackYourData). Partition Doctor has a demo download
(http://www.ptdd.com/download.htm) that might help to check if your
partition is okay or not. Ultimate Boot CD (www.ultimatebootcd.com)
gives you downloadable ISO images for creating a bootable CD on which
there are many utilities, including partition tools. It includes the
Western Digital diagnostics tool but you can download WD's Data
Lifeguard and other diagnostics tools (http://snipurl.com/6imp).

Presumably you have already perform a full scan using a recently updated
anti-virus product, and checked for malware/spyware using Ad-Aware,
Spybot Search & Destroy, CWShredder, and SpywareBlaster and inpected the
output from HijackThis. I haven't used WinPatrol but some users like
it. You can also run the free online scan from PestPatrol but be aware
that this product generates false positives (i.e., it will tell you that
there is an infection but there is not). If it reports an infection,
use its online description of the pest to manually check and eradicate
the pest(s). It report 3 pests on my system but when going through
their description and manual eradication procedure, nothing of the pest
was found on my system so I haven't a clue upon what they based their
detections. No other product found infections.

By the way, how big is the largest partition on your first hard drive?
Have you tried to defragment the F: partition?