Windows – Tool to repair MFT or NTFS journal on a disk which underwent failed hibernation

I've read through some of the posts related to corrupt or not working NTFS partitions, but without a proper solution for my case. Here it is: my system is

• SSD on mini PCI express (PCIe), with Windows 7 installed on it. Two partitions: one with Dell utilities (40 MB), the rest the windows installation itself (119 GB).
• HDD with 450 GB of NTFS files, and 30 GB of all the partitions that make a Ubuntu installation work (swap, system, etc.)

The boot device is Internal HDD (IRRT), the only possible one; this enables IRRT, and starts GRUB, which by pointing to some sector on the HDD can start Windows 7 on the SSD.

Now what happened:

I put my computer to sleep, and then it went to hibernation after some hours. The wireless card was physically disabled (Dell M4600). Then I started up the laptop, and before GRUB was complete, I switched on the wireless card again. Then pressed "windows" on GRUB. Then BSOD, reboot, and windows cannot find the booting partition: "needed device missing".

I have tried the Windows 7 recovery disc: can only repair the tiny bit of the Windows installation that is on the HDD, cannot see the SSD. The "repair" does nothing. Removing the hard drive to get around GRUB by force did not make the Windows DVD see the boot sector of the SSD. It was not enough of a "Windows installation".

Now, if I start to act as if I would install Windows again, Windows sees the two partitions on drive C, they are still here, in NTFS.

Then I went to Linux and tried fdisk: the partitions are still here, again. But they don't show up in Nautilus, and I cannot mount them. However, dd can recover data: if I try reading data at some random big offset (like offset 20 GB, and read 10 blocks), the blocks are indeed "data", no problem to access the drive physically, it doesn't seem to have failed completely at least. I will do a backup tomorrow then.

I tried TestDisk: boot sectors are identical and seem OK, but both MFT show as "bad", nothing more. Cannot access the files inside the file system.

On that site, I saw something about a wrong write in NTFS journaling, Need to recover corrupt NTFS partition .

Almost last post. Nothing about it on the Internet, as far as I searched.

And I suspect something about the hibernate process is not reversed, as I remember that the hibernate process changes the boot sequence a lot (or else you could move hiberfil.sys without a problem, but you can't. It needs to be in the root directory, because there is no place in the boot loader to accommodate for a folder location, or even another drive!).

So maybe both boot sectors were affected by the hibernation, and when it could not complete the process of reverting to normal boot, it stayed like this, Windows looks where the boot pointer points and does not recognize a normal Windows installation and refuses to repair it, and as Linux cannot find the MFT it cannot mount it…or maybe something different, affecting the MFT itself. I don't know… I will try CHKDSK and, after backup, fixmbr, from the Windows 7 DVD.

UPDATE: fixmbr and fixboot seem to only work from the recovery console, and I couldn't access it. From the Windows 7 DVD, I could do CHKDSK : it only said the volume was NTFS before crashing because "MFT corrupted. Will try repair. MFT Could not be repaired. Exit chkdsk".

When trying diskpart, it saw my partition on the SSD as…Raw. So, this does not correspond to what CHKDSK has seen.

Something is weird in all this: all this time, Windows did not see the first 40 MB of my SSD, which contained Dell utilities. On Windows 7 Explorer the main partition of the SSD was always C:\, and the partition of the HDD was D:\: this 40 MB partition on the SSD never appeared anywhere. But now, Windows sees this 40 MB partition, and gives it the C:\ letter. While the D:\ letter corresponds to the 119 GB partition, "Raw" format, unable to be read. I don't understand anything…