For those who have run into lots of boot record corruption issues or file table corruption issues and for those who aren't aware of a convenient way to get it repaired, I've some good news....
One of my friends recently crashed her Vista and skipped the CHKDISK warning a couple of times, until she realized that her NTFS MFT (Master File Table) got corrupted.
Lesson learnt - Never ignore CHKDISK warnings. They are usually an omen for a possible disaster to your data.
Inspite of running checkdisk regularly, I myself have gotten into such NTFS file corruption as well as file table corruption issues a couple of times in the past. But luckily I could get into a DOS prompt those times either using Windows XP command prompt or using a legacy Win 98 bootdisk or so. But this time it was a deadlock because Vista just freezes when you login, so that the hope of getting a terminal is totally unimaginable. (I cursed myself for leaving back my Win98 boot disk back in India)
Since my friend had an Ubuntu Jaunty (Inside Windows) installation, I just used it to gain entry into the system. But the problem is that the NTFS media just doesn't get detected because its MFT is corrupt.
As every other human being does, my natural instinct was to lookup Google. And as always, I got a panacea for this irritating problem - TESTDISK.
Then the sequence of steps that I followed -
- sudo apt-get install testdisk
- sudo testdisk
- Choose the partition to repair and rewrite the MFT from its mirror (for those who weren't aware of this, NTFS has a mirror MFT to help restore a corrupt MFT).
- Reboot the system and get into Vista - Viola, it worked!
Until we meet again,
-Srini-
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