Hello, Summary: NTFS drive corrupted in unknown way, seeking advice and perhaps a recommended data recovery/analysis tool or other next steps. Long version:
I recently rebuilt my Debian box and included a second hard drive I scavenged from my old Windows system. The drive was 160GB NTFS formatted drive. My idea was to copy all the stuff I actually wanted off of the drive onto a temporary area of the main hard drive and then reformat the drive as something more... sensible. I set the appropriate directory structure to copy recursively and left for an extended period of time. Unfortunately, I'm not 100% positive that this problem didn't exist before the copy, but I'm reasonably certain. What happened is that all directories except the one I had been copying from became inaccessible. I was not terribly worried, because I had a backup of that structure on an external drive. I was going to go ahead and format the drive anyway and then copy everything back onto it, including from the external drive. It was then that I discovered the kernel version I was working with did not have support for drives that were that large. I found this out by going to try and repartition the drive only to find out that I was instantly forced out of the program because the drive was partitioned beyond its size (or so it thought). I later removed the drive from the Debian box and placed it in a Windows box where I was still unable to see the directory structure outside of the one I had copied. Running scandisk on the drive revealed the structure of all of the directories and the names of all of the files, but trying to copy files off of the drive resulted in more dismay. I haven't looked closely at the contents of the drive I copied the files to, but what I do know is the files are no longer entirely intact. There appear to be multiple copies of some files (although Windows only shows 1) that I assume must be shadow copies of some variety. The end result, however, is that the files are no longer intact. As far as I know, the drive is still 100% intact on the hardware side. No bad sectors have been identified and it seems to be operating just fine. I'm imagining that somewhere along the line the partition table or MBR got damaged, but I'm not sure by what or how. What I'm wondering is if anyone knows someone who might have experienced an even remotely similar problem so I can get an idea of what went wrong. In addition to that, I'm hoping to get some advice on a next step to get the data I want off of the drive. Whether anyone knows of a recovery tool or another method I might pursue, I'm all ears. If anyone thinks they might be able to provide some assistance I would be much obliged. Thanks, -Michael
