Re: Corrupted NTFS needs reformat - how to preserve windows installation

Did you try running the fixboot command from the Recovery Console?

Can you mount the disk to another Windows XP installation and when you do can you see and access all the files on the corrupt disk? If no to the above do you have an NTFS or FAT32 driver for your Linux installation?

If you can answer yes to one of the above what you can do is get another hard disk, mount it to an XP box or use the XP cd to partition and format it and mark the primary partition active (prepare it for XP) then mount it and the broken disk to your other operating system. You can then use Xcopy, XXcopy or (something similar if you are doing this with Linux) and then using the appropriate switches copy the files and folder structure from the broken disk to the new disk. Once done you may need to run the fixboot command on the new disk for it to boot. No guarantee but worth a try.

John

Martin T. wrote:

Hi all,

SHORT:
------
How do I preserve a Windows XP sp2 installation (registry, drivers, installed programs) when I want to reformat my C: drive, without using a disk cloning tool??

LONG:
My C: NTFS partition went bad when a power outage occurred during shutdown. Now, when XP tries to boot I get a UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME blue screen.
Booting to the recovery console and running chkdsk /P will result in chkdsk telling me that there are unrecoverable errors on C: (In fact, the recovery console won't even dir the contents of the C: drive.
So far so bad.
When I access the NTFS volume (read only) from my Linux boot option, I can see that basically all data on there is intact and accessible (read only). (Checked with a few images and zip files -- assuming that most other stuff would also be correct.)

Now, as I see this, since CHKDSK refuses to repair the volume I will have to reformat (I can get all data I need off it.)

What would also be great be when I'd be able to preserve my Windows Install.

I can't use a Clone Program since these will copy at the partition level and so I guess will just replicate the broken NFTS structure. (-> ??)

Is there a way to preserve my old registry etc. ??


thanks!
-Martin-

.

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