NTFS Partition Recovery

Get to Know About A Technique of NTFS Partition Recovery!

NTFS (New Technology File System) is standard Windows NT File System which is available in the later versions of Windows as well. NTFS is an improved version and is superior to early FAT and HPFS File Systems in many aspects like better support for Metadata, usage of advanced data structures, disk space utilization and reliability. But corruption concerns of this NTFS file system leaves users with despair as NTFS partition recovery is not an easy task. NTFS corruption can completely stop you from accessing the files or data saved on this partition. Situation can worsen if you lose the data permanently saved on it due to severe corruption. This blog will enlighten you about some repair procedures to deal with NTFS corruption issues.

What is NTFS Partition Corruption Issue?

Windows system with NTFS partition can throw errors if the partition has a corrupt boot sector. This will also lead to a situation where Windows boot menu selections are not available. Following error message can be displayed when boot sector is corrupted;

Windows NT could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt <%SYSTEMROOT%>\SYSTEM32\NTOSKRNL.EXE

In such situation any user will try to perform emergency repair process. But in case repair procedure is started again an error message is displayed as;

Setup has determined that your file system is corrupt

Primary action taken by user can involve booting with MS-DOS system disk using command fdisk/MBR. But many times this does not work and users need to immediately take action to resolve corrupt NTFS boot sector issue. It is recommended to have a backup of hard disk data before going further.

• Run Norton utility (Diskedit.exe) from an MS DOS boot disk.
• Go to Tools menu and select configuration.
• Clear read-only check box and then click OK.
• Select Drive under Object menu and click on Physical disk option. Select Hard disk in question and hit OK.
• Norton utilities DiskEdit must read hard disk selected by you and display data.
• Select As Partition table in View menu and note the starting and ending cylinder sector.
• Select Physical sector on Object menu.
• Input the starting cylinder, sector, and side, and then select the maximum amount of sectors and click OK.
• If the boot sector appears to be valid, you will be able to recover data successfully.

Note: This procedure is only valid on the Windows NT versions. It will not work on advanced versions.

How to Recover Data From Advance Windows Versions?

The method described above will work on Windows NT versions only and it also needs expertise about both booting and MBR. However if you are struggling with NTFS partition of Windows OS of advanced version or you are not aware of how the boot sector appears to be valid, you can take help of third party solution like Hard Drive Recovery tool to attain easy and assured NTFS partition recovery. This application works on all the versions of Windows and is very easy to work on. It will help you to recover complete data from the corrupted NTFS partition and will avoid any risk of permanent data loss.