Help Recovering MFT

[erudite_22]

Hello all,

Recently we had one of our servers reboot and when it started back up Windows Server 2003 started a checkdisk, well the certain individual was impatient and did not want to wait for the checkdisk to complete so they pulled the plug and rebooted cold. Now windows reports that the MFT is missing. I need to know if any of you can point me to some software or some way to recover a missing mft or at least a method of recovering the lost data, approx 1TB......

I understand this might not be possible, but even if the files don't preserver their names I can deal with that, but I need to restore those files. Thanks for the help.

 

[bmouring]

I think you might be in trouble on that one. There are some non-free deals that claim to be able to recover a lost master file table, but I was unable to find and successfuly stories about it and it doesn't surprise me at all.

From what I know of filesystems (better than most, I'd venture on wagering since I wrote a simple one once): If you lose the "entry point" of a filesystem (the MFT is just that), unless there's a backup one in a known location you are not going to be able to guarentee finding it again, no matter what kind of "magic number" scheme you try to embed into the data structure.

I would go ahead and at least give this a go: dowload the ultimate boot cd and try running some of the provided utilities to check the disk (like booting NTFS4DOS and looking at the disk, possibly doing a chkdsk, also perhaps seeing if FreeDisk can recover that kinda thing, but I believe that's only for partition tables).

The chances of those working are fairly slim, so if you have backups, now is the time to dig them out in the likely case you'll need to use it.

 

[erudite_22]

This too is my suspicion, that I am essentially S O L

Check Disk won't run because it reports no MFT

I will see if any of those options will help me out. If anyone else any suggestions please speak up I am desperate

 

[bmouring]

If you are, however, able to spend a lot of time sifting through chuncks of recovered data that is not specifically labeled and may be one of more files (will need to inspect them to figure that out), there are low-level recovery tools avaialble for free, the first one I found while searching is this one

Good luck, and backup important systems! In the event that my primary drives fail or the filesystems become irrevocably corrupt in my home system, the backup snapshot drive can have my system running in minutes.