Recovery of NTFS partition quick formatted to ExFAT

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by hughesnick, Nov 4, 2013.

  1. hughesnick

    hughesnick Private E-2

    Hi, considering my self a minor geek I am stuck, HELP please,
    story as follows:
    Hard drive 3 partitions, dell recovery, XP and Vista (dual boot)
    1. Could boot vista normallt or xp in safe mode but crash on xp normal boot.
    2. Tried dskchk on xp partition from vista caused crash if dskchk /r, dskchk /f OK
    3. Tried dskchk on xp on boot caused crash if /r, /f OK
    4. Removed drive and put as usb external drive on different laptop (win 8) copied all files to another external (just in case it gets worse). All files via about 20 copied. Still want to recreate the xp partition so can boot cp normally in original laptop.
    5. Chkdsk /f from win 8 laptop OK as in vista /r errors only different error insufficient dpace to revover bad sectors. Guessed must free some space so deleted 14Gb. Same problem with chfsk /r
    6. Tried various partiton recovery software then seemed to get stuck probably due to bad secyors then I really screwed up and accidentally did quick format of original partition to exFAT.
    7. VAR seems to find the mft tree structure and ive save this to a new partition on the win 8 machine. But its missing about 2,000 files of 477, 000.
    Question. What can rebuild my xp partitions mft and ignore bad sectors, there were no bad seectors in the file structure, and only a few in the file data. Most were in unused disk space as indicated by the various partition revovery programs I trief before I did the accidental exFAT format. I want to recover the Mft on the original drive and put back tje NTFS as it was before the format.

    Any help most appreciated, the bad sectors make every thing take days
    and I only want to get the user file data back and forget any bad sectors in free space.
     
  2. hughesnick

    hughesnick Private E-2

    The damaged xp partition was installed after vista, I will try the drive back in the original machine.
    I need to get back from the accidental exFAT quick format of the xp partition and see if I boot into xp it will still boot in safe mode. Ie get the exFAT on the xp partition back to NTFS as sevondary boot from the vista primary boot partition.
     
  3. mdonah

    mdonah Major Geek Extraordinaire

    The fact that you've got bad sectors indicates that the drive is about to fail. If it does, you'll lose access to your default Vista installation as well. Sorry, but it looks like you're going to have to replace the drive. Do what you can to save any important data files to external storage, replace the drive and re-install XP, Vista and your apps.
     

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