RESOLVED Corrupted NTFS HDD on 10.5.2 (But capacity is shown correctly) Options

[Innus]

Hey, I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on this one.

First of all: thanks to everyone on this forum, it's been an invaluable resource over the last week getting my hackintosh working. I've run into a fairly serious problem now though, hopefully someone can 'pull one out the bag' for me...

I got my Kalyway 10.5.2 install working great, patched the binaries, dual screen, everything seemed great. I plugged in the music-filled SATA HDD from when it was an XP machine, and OSX mounted it fine, but only as read-only. I did some research and used NTFS-3G for OSX to mount the drive as readable AND writeable, and everything was fine. Drive worked, everything accessible, all good, so I used this method to load the XP iTunes library file, and this all worked. hurrah...

I booted up the Mac this morning, and to my horror, everything on the music drive (except some Mac directories starting with '.') was gone. Scary feeling..

The drive usage (98% used, 3GB free, or somewhere around there) is still shown correctly though, so I have some hope of recovering the data. The drive is back in the windows machine now, and it's still the same, nothing miraculously re-appeared.

I know that I shouldn't write anything to the drive until the data is recovered.

I have a backup, but it's from August so I've lost quite a bit of music that I bought online, as well as some other stuff that was on that drive.

Any ideas on recovering the data, bearing in mind that the disk usage appears to be correct? As far as I can tell, a bug in NTFS-3G has written the allocation table (or whatever it is in NTFS) incorrectly, effectively hiding the data from view, but no disk-wiping operations have occured so it should still be there,.. somewhere..

I know there are disk recovery utils out there, but I've no idea which ones will help, and which ones might make the situation worse.

Essentially what I'm looking for, if such a thing exists, is a way to recover the allocation table rather than the files themselves (which are hopefully still intact).

Many thanks in advance, I'm feeling quite sick at losing this music

Ian


p.s. if it's important:
AMD Athlon 3200
Gigabyte ga-kn8-9 motherboard
2GB RAM
Geforce 6600 256mb

[dies]

Have you run check disk? smart status?

Try

http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php

testdisk *may* be of some use.

[Innus]

Hey great, I'll check it out! I've had a lot of success with Disk Internals NTFS recovery, as in .. it'll show me all my files are there, but demands $100 to recover them. Pretty steep! If there's anything comparable out there that's a little cheaper or .. well, free, that would be better, considering I don't intend to use this program more than once!!



Hurrah! it's found them



Ian

EDIT: Doh, test disc didn't fix the problem unfortunately. It's more aimed at finding deleted partitions I think, and my partition is still intact. I tried the MBR fixer function but to no avail. Cheers for your help though!

[tungmeister]

have you done a full disk check in windows? i had the same problem when i was using ntfs-3g, happend on my music HD aswell lol, but once i booted back into windows i have it a diskcheck and the files were recovered. since then i've been using paragon NTFS for Mac OS X which i find works much better and is alot more stable, it even includes a disk checker so you never need to revert to windows to sort it.

[Innus]

that sounds very hopeful!

I'll check it out, cheers!

[JBLanteigne]

Maybe the software called "recuva" for windows could help you.. not sure but in these desesperate cases, it worth to try:

http://www.recuva.com/

good luck

[Innus]

have you done a full disk check in windows? i had the same problem when i was using ntfs-3g, happend on my music HD aswell lol, but once i booted back into windows i have it a diskcheck and the files were recovered. since then i've been using paragon NTFS for Mac OS X which i find works much better and is alot more stable, it even includes a disk checker so you never need to revert to windows to sort it.

Tungmeister! wooooooo! Your tip fixed it! I've got all my music back!! Great idea, would never had guessed that simple scan disk could help. You're a hero! also, great tip: paragon works great as a NTFS driver.

p.s. cheers JBLanteigne, it might have helped!

[mreveryday]

I feel your pain because NTFS-3G also corrupted my HDD. Luckily, I am very professional at this and recovered everything (99.9%).

Because I was experimentalling OSX, I caught the symptom almost immediately. All it did was corrupted all the files I have writting to it and my MBR, not allowing me to read any of the partitions normally.

Run fixmbr on recovery console from Windows XP disc to fix the MBR and then chkdsk /f (or chkdsk /r) to fix the HDD integrity. If it also destroyed your boot, run fixboot. If your partition is not flagged as active boot, run fdisk -e /dev/disk[HDD] then flag [Parition#] in a Linux or MacOSX terminal to make it boot again.


Sorry if this was like 8 months ago but this incident was very stressful to me. Corrupt data equals dead HDD. Data == HDD.