Bjorn, I can recommend R-Studio Data Recovery (www.r-tt.com) for recovering data from disks that are still mostly readable. It works best when you use it to recover to a second disk that is error free. It has recovered disks for me that I could not recover any other way.
I have found that it is dangerous to delay recovering a bad disk these days. I have had very poor luck with chkdsk swapping sectors. The results seem to last for a few days to weeks at the best. Even using low level tools from the drive vendor to scan and swap sectors didn't last long. My suspicion is that once today's hard drives start reporting errors at all, they are near death and should be replaced immediately. The old days when sector swapping was useful for longer term usage may be gone. I tend not to use sector swapping even for temporary usage, as I am not convinced the results are even temporarily reliable. Good luck, -- David Mitchell Björn Helgason wrote: > I have a 500G USB disk with 31.284 indexes in the $Mft. > > http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-mft.htm > > There are around 9G free on the disk but there are bad sectors on the disk. > > Problem is it seems that the $Mft has bad sectors so I am having > problems with getting at the files. > > The problem is acting very strange and sometimes I can connect the > disk and investigate the directory and sometimes it just disappears. > > I have used explorer, disk management and DOS command prompt and it > behaves differently in between environments. > I can sometimes see the disk and directories in DOS and not in disk > management nor explorer and in a program for open files I can still > see the files and even open files. > > I have tried chkdsk a few times and the first time it claimed to be > moving files out of bad sectors including the $Mft but since then no > errors reported. > > It looks like the $Mft needs to be in sector 0 but I have seen a > reference of suggesting that I move the $Mft to another place but I > have not seen how I should do that and that brings me to the question. > > Does anyone reading this have a suggestion what to try to get a > working $Mft and how to move it if possible? > > I do not yet have a spare disk to make a backup of these files and I > actually am not sure if or how I could make a copy of the files > without a working $Mft file. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
