Re: Unable to open files after chkdsk

I think that it's time to call a data recovery firm and explain the situation to them and see if they can recover your files. These files appear to be quite important and with all due respect neither you or hardly any of the contributors here have sufficient data recovery experience to be able to walk through this by newsgroup exchange and discussions. From here on, if the files are recoverable, any thing that you do may seriously or completely reduce any chances of successful recovery by data recovery professionals.

If you wish to keep on working on this by yourself (and with the help of the contributors here) I urge you to clone or image the corrupt disk and work on it instead of the original disk. With the use of data recovery software you may be able to salvage the files. Another thing that I might try if I were in your position is mounting the disk to a Linux installation and see if Linux can read them. On occasion I have seen or heard of files that were unreadable by Windows yet Linux for some reason or other could read them. At times it seems that minor MFT or NTFS corruption that completely prevents Windows from reading the files has less effect on Linux and it can read them, worth a try I think.

As for your questions of "why did this happen" and "how can I prevent this in the future" there really isn't much that we can tell you. Disk or file corruption happens and I would say that in 99% of the cases we don't know why it happened, we run the disk checking utilities or we restore from backups and we move on. I think that in your case you had some bad luck thrown in with the disk corruption. Your backup strategy appears sound but as luck would have it you were backing up what turned out to be corrupt files and no one knew. In a perfect world the backups should have been tested, but if you did that a few times already and were satisfied that the backup method was sound and that it provided usable backups then it is understandable that you may not have done frequent regular tests on the backups.

One thing that isn't mentioned often enough is that there is *always* a risk of data loss when chkdsk is run on a drive. Sometimes it can be minor data loss and at other times it can be nearly complete data loss! The more important the data the more precautions one should take before running chkdsk, in your case perhaps doing a clone or image of the disk before running chkdsk might have allowed you to recover the files from the clone. But then who would have thought or bothered with that? I would have said, "I have a backup so why bother with that" and done exactly what you did. In hindsight it may have been wise to clone or image the disk before running chkdsk, but hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?

Good luck!

John

Chris wrote:

Thanks guys, though seems bigLBA was enabled.

its got me completly confused, All the files are there, and the sizes all show correct, yet I cant seem to open any of them

"zeke7" wrote:


On Jan 24, 8:16 am, "Colon Terminus" <Colon_Termi...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

"Chris" <Chris @discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

news:F7D00CF0-ABB1-4526-9EE9-E054117F802C@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




We have a windows 2000 PC running in our office where all our common files
are stored. Basically all our word documents, spreadsheets and our

databases.


The system reported a problem on the one hard drive where all the files

are

stored and requested that chkdsk be run on reboot. This was done and

windows

went ahead and repaired a number of files.

All the files are still there, and even the correct file sizes are
displayed, however we are unable to access 50% of them. When you try open

a

file in word, word tries to import the file saying it doesn't recognise

the

file type. The same with excel, PDF's, and JPG's.

As Murphy's law would have it, it seems its most of the critical files

that

we currently need that can't open. Our backup system is automated as well,
and as luck would have it, we only picked up the problem after the backups
where over written.

Is there anyway to repair these files?

As has been said, there's no way to repair/recover these corrupted files.

It is possible that the corruption occurred during chkdsk because you have a
large hard disk in a PC without the BigLBA registry hack applied. I've seen
this several times.

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If your disk has (had?) a corrupted partition due to not having Enable
BigLBA installed as above, the following might work on a backup set
(but not on post-chkdsk-repaired files): first enable bigLBA, then fix
the partition using http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk , and your
files might be restored to working order.


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