NTFS Corruption

[RitechSystems]

I'm working on a machine that seems to have some type of NTFS corruption. The drive appears to have no issues.

It is a western digital 250 gb hard drive. The western digital and also the hitachi tools both pass the extended tests. I can use the XP recovery console and browse all of the usual directories except. In an Ubuntu live CD, all the directories are available even "Documents and Settings". I can create an image of the drive in Acronis with no messages, I can also create on in ghost but ghost does warn that the NTFS has the "dirty" flag set. In recovery console chkdsk stops at 25% and gives a "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems" error. An attempt to do a repair install gets to the point where it is checking the drive and also stops at 25%. The MSDART CD booted up and said it fixed some corrupt registry hives like software and default, after which got past the safe mode menu and started running chkdsk, almost immediately it went back to the menu loop.

It repeated boots to the menu that lists last good/safe mode etc, some times it gives the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM error which means the system hive is corrupt. I tried copying this out of the latest system restore folder.

My next idea is to image this drive to another and see if chkdsk will run but I think the issues will follow. Any other ideas?

 

[RitechSystems]

Anyone use testdisk?
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I have a few images of this drive so I don't think it will hurt to try the MFT recovery:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Advanced_NTFS_Boot_and_MFT_Repair

 

[MobileTechie]

Have you run fixboot or fixmbr from the RC? Not that I'd expect them to overcome this 25% sticking point to be honest.

If you've managed to clone it OK then I'd definitely run chkdsk on the clone not least because it doesn't risk any damage to the original disk.

I'd suggest checking the drive by booting into a copy of MHDD which seems to be amongst the most reliable disk testers because it deals with ATA direct and not BIOS or OS. It will show you exactly where any sector problems are, if any exist.

If it wasn't for the fact that you can clone the entire disk with Acronis with no problems I'd say it was a h/w disk problem.

I've used testdisk but I don't understand it enough to comment on details of it's use. I've used it in a recipe book fashion.

Sounds to me like you are headed towards recovering the data and reformatting if the disk really is healthy.