$Mft corrupt. - Run chkdsk.

This is a friends computer.
It was slowing down on the internet, and apparently in general, so she tried to reboot it. It started "looping." Meaning, it gets to the windows boot screen, the blue lines get about halfway across the status bar, and it reboots itself. It does this in regular mode, and in Safe mode. In safe-mode w/ drivers, it is freezing on windows/system32/drivers/agpCPQ.sys. (It's a compaq with integrated video)

There is a blue screen, but it is so fast, there is no way for me to see any part of an error, or message. I am able to boot to the recovery partition, but she wants files recovered before reformatting. In the recovery boot, I get the $Mft corrupt error, and it recommend running chkdsk. There is no option of course in the recovery boot to do this. So I loaded up my Ultimate Win Boot CD, and got the same error about every 5 seconds or so. None of the included disk checking software along with the recommended chkdsk would work. They received errors attempting to read the drive. I even borrowed another working desktop, and tried to load their drive as a secondary drive in that system. Same problem, $Mft error every 5 seconds or so, and chkdsk does not work.

Is there anyway you know of to recover files before I blast this drive?

 

There are programs that are supposed to let you recover files from drives with a corrupt MFT. Look under the drive section and see if there's any there that will meet your needs. If not, do a google search for MFT repair. I haven't found any that will repair it. But they will let you access the drive and get the files you want off.

 

Yeah, I'm messing with one now. So many options, so little time.
Any idea if this is an outbreak of a virus? I now know of three computers with similar symptoms, all of them complaining of slow internet - rebooted into this! All of them in the last few days.

 

It does seem weird to me. From what I have read there's more than one copy of the $mft. So if it does get corrupted the backup is used. But I haven't heard of any new virus that's doing this.