NTFS Partition gets auto-corrupt, becomes RAW and unreadable

hard drivememory managementmulti-bootpartitioning

I have dual boot on my machine: Windows 8 and Ubuntu 11.10.
Suddenly, one of my partitions went corrupt.

On Windows, it's showing this error.

Location is not available.
E:/ is not available.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

Here is the snapshot of Disk Management on my Windows 8 developer beta.

Snapshot of Disk management

Here, I have:  
The first partition: ext4 filesystem: ubuntu 11.10  
The second partition: swap  
The third partition: Has my precious data(***NOT WORKIING, type auto-changed from NTFS to RAW***)  
The fourth partition: Has data too, and working  
The fifth partition: The Windows partition(Windows is installed on this one)  

On Ubuntu,
When I try to mount the partition via nautilus, I get

Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

On running this command,

jatin@silverSpoon:~$ dmesg | tail
[   24.754970] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready
[   35.552058] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present
[  217.511030] exe (2592): /proc/2592/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/2592/oom_score_adj instead.
[ 1420.818037] NTFS driver 2.1.30 [Flags: R/O MODULE].
[ 1420.853141] __ntfs_error: 27 callbacks suppressed
[ 1420.853150] NTFS-fs error (device sda2): ntfs_mapping_pairs_decompress(): Corrupt attribute.  deltaxcn = 0xe37f, max_cluster = 0xe34b
[ 1420.853157] NTFS-fs error (device sda2): ntfs_mapping_pairs_decompress(): Corrupt mapping pairs array in non-resident attribute.
[ 1420.853163] NTFS-fs error (device sda2): ntfs_read_inode_mount(): ntfs_mapping_pairs_decompress() failed with error code -5.  $MFT is corrupt.
[ 1420.853169] NTFS-fs error (device sda2): ntfs_read_inode_mount(): Failed. Marking inode as bad.
[ 1420.853175] NTFS-fs error (device sda2): ntfs_fill_super(): Failed to load essential metadata.

Running fdisk shows this:

jatin@silverSpoon:~$ fdisk /dev/sda -l 
Cannot open /dev/sda

Running fsck, shows this:

jatin@silverSpoon:~$ sudo fsck /dev/sda
fsck from util-linux 2.19.1
e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
fsck.ext2: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program?

Mt /etc/fstab file shows:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=07d58b27-8c22-466f-a770-dc720d6be71c /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
#UUID=bd6782f4-cf13-4a81-bc68-d72ab26b1113 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/mapper/cryptswap1 none swap sw 0 0

and fdisk shows this:

jatin@silverSpoon:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xaa692010

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048   123383807    61690880    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2       123383808   429830143   153223168    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       429830144   461078527    15624192   83  Linux
/dev/sda4       461080574   625141759    82030593    5  Extended
/dev/sda5       461080576   466937855     2928640   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6       466939904   625141759    79100928    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1: 2998 MB, 2998927360 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364 cylinders, total 5857280 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xaed90ab6

Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

And at last, file -s /dev/sda2 shows

jatin@silverSpoon:~$ sudo file -s /dev/sda2
/dev/sda2: x86 boot sector, code offset 0x52, OEM-ID "NTFS    ", sectors/cluster 8, reserved sectors 0, Media descriptor 0xf8, heads 255, hidden sectors 123383808, dos < 4.0 BootSector (0x80)

Best Answer

Windows says the partition is raw when it does not see any filesystem on it. When Windows reports this error, it could be because you haven't initialized the partition, haven't formatted the drive or you are trying to access a partition that is corrupt. In your case it seems to be corrupt.

The errors from dmesg say your NTFS is corrupt. Specifically the MFT(Master File Table), which stores the meta data to access your user data. Try TestDisk which can recover MFT. Or use Active File Recovery to recover your files.

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