Is it possible to backup the MFT in Windows? – NTFS

hard drivemftntfs

I experienced my first crashed Hard Drive a few days back, luckily it was not the primary disk and was just full of software which I could reinstall on.

I tried several utilities like

To try and save my hard drive partition however they could not fix it.

I had to reformat the disk as the MFT (Master File Table) got corrupted and Windows chkdsk could not find the backup for it.

I was wondering how I can locate this MFT and back it up on a seperate location, say one of my other hard drives.

I am not using RAID

Disks are SATAII

Is it possible, how can I prevent a crashed disk in future?

Thanks for your time!

Best Answer

Not really an answer to your question, but NTFSInfo can at least tell you the clusters where the MFT is located:

NTFSInfo output

Maybe that's a start. But even if you extract the MFT, I have a hard time coming up with an idea on how to make use of it at a later time. I agree with jdh that a full backup would most likely be the best solution as that will make it a lot easier to recover from a failure.

Related Question