I've used search, but none of the results match my problem so I didn't have to ask separate question.
I've installed Windows 7 RTM recently and since then partitions located on one of my HDDs have gone "crazy". They used to "freeze" and didn't open in explorer for some time (minute or two, usually), sometimes all partitions of the drive wouldn't show until reboot and finally, one of those partitions started showing "disk structure is corrupted and unreadable" warning, it appeared in Disk Management window as RAW and CHKDSK showed MFT to be corrupt.
There were no important data on the partition, and I didn't have enough time to analyze the problem at the moment, so I just reformatted it and ran an antivirus scan on system.
After that problem settled for some time, but yesterday the problematic HDD again vanished from the system. After a reboot CHKDSK identified the MFT of four partitions corrupt and now they are all in same conditions as the above mentioned one. But the difference is that the files stored in them are extremely important.
And just for information: I upgraded from Windows 7 build 7077, but had some performance issues, so I reformatted system drive and installed a fresh Windows 7 RTM on it.
I've downloaded TestDisk, and it shows all the partitions marked as NTFS (not RAW) and my knowledge of the program wasn't sufficient to obtain any other information from it 🙂
Is there a way to let me restore the MFT or just access files so I can backup them before reformatting the drive?
P.S.: my reformatted drive is showing no problems, could there be a problem with Windows 7 tself? I googled, but with no results.
Best Answer
You could use something like testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk to try and fix it or any data recovery tool that can scan the disk directly without using the mft like the tools from here http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1 this will be very slow however.