Windows NT Disk Disasters

NTFS to the rescue

Campbell Boucher-Burnet fixed an NT drive disaster with the following method:
Amazingly, after ripping an old drive out of another machine, installing and configuring NT on it, doing some net-research into how to analyze and repair damaged NTFS partitions, and downloading the NT resource kit support tools package as a result (because it contains the indicated free and essential utility, disk probe), I did some hairy walking of the partition tables to find the backup master boot record, and the used the sector editor feature of diskprobe to copy it back to the (painfully discovered) location of the actual master boot record. This way, I got my 6 GIGs of data back in almost one piece. 

In fact, I am overjoyed to say that the missing piece (which, as it turned out, was the WINNT directory, with all of my address book entries, e-mail, bookmarks, etc...ARRRRRGGGG!), was reclaimed also, simply by running Windows NT error checking against it.  Hooray for the NT file system!  I will never slag it again.  There is much to be said for a file system that has redundancy and recovery information built right into it, even if you do have to take a small hit in speed-wise performance.

For Further Reading:

• This page has the best info we've seen on how to use DiskProbe.
• http://texasnack.tripod.com/help/w2k/winntstartuptshoot.html
• For other NT-related disk topics, see http://zero.hqu.edu.cn/nt/faq/filesystem.htm
• See also: www.ntcompatible.com or try a Google Search

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