Question: 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
- Easeus Partition Wizard – www.easeus.com/
- TestDisk – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk
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!
Answer: Not really an answer to your question, but NTFSInfo can at least tell you the clusters where the MFT is located:
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.