Recreate Missing MBR & MFT

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul Hand
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Paul Hand

A software that I was looking at somehow managed to replace or erase or
corrupt the MBR and the MFT on a Seagate 500 GB drive. This drive was
formatted as NTFS. My operating system is on another drive. My Windows XP
sees the drive but is calling it Healthy(Active) and unformatted with no
file system. However, a data recovery program sees what looks like all the
original NTFS files still in existence on the drive. I used this recovery
software to successfully copy a 17 GB file to another drive. This software
can only recover files by copying them to a different drive.

I don't have enough free space to copy approximately 400 GB from the 500 GB
drive. Is there a way to recreate the MBR and the MFT based on the existing
files on the drive so that I can use the files where they are rather than
having to add another drive to copy to?

Thanks for any help.
 
Paul Hand said:
I don't have enough free space to copy approximately 400 GB from the 500
GB drive. Is there a way to recreate the MBR and the MFT based on the
existing files on the drive so that I can use the files where they are
rather than having to add another drive to copy to?
Click to expand...

Try Ultimate Boot CD there are several disk and file system apps on there.
One app in particular I have used is called TestDisk (Christophe Grenier) it
searches for lost and backup copies of mft.

Be Very Careful, most recovery apps make changes that can't be undone and
you could easily lose all your data. If it's not an emergency I would
advise do a lot of reading first, good luck.
 
Paul Hand said:
A software that I was looking at somehow managed to replace or erase or corrupt the MBR and the MFT on a Seagate 500 GB drive.
This drive was formatted as NTFS. My operating system is on another drive. My Windows XP sees the drive but is calling it
Healthy(Active) and unformatted with no file system. However, a data recovery program sees what looks like all the original NTFS
files still in existence on the drive. I used this recovery software to successfully copy a 17 GB file to another drive. This
software can only recover files by copying them to a different drive.

I don't have enough free space to copy approximately 400 GB from the 500 GB drive. Is there a way to recreate the MBR and the MFT
based on the existing files on the drive so that I can use the files where they are rather than having to add another drive to
copy to?
Click to expand...

What makes you think the MBR and/or MFT are corrupt?

If you have recovery software in place that is able to read the drive and files,
the sanest approach is to evacute the data to another drive. Then you can
work on recovering the whole volume, if you still need to.

I can understand not wanting to shell out for a new drive,, but look at
it this way; you can use the new drive for backing up your data for
the next time something like this happens, and the recovery software
is not able to see the files.
 
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