My broken MFT (chkdsk fails)

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry



Hello,

The filetable of my data partition has become 'unstable', repairing it with chkdsk works sometimes, but running it again a couple of minutes later just turns up new errors.

Some context: I'm running Vista Bussiness (in Dutch so I don't know the exact errormessages), with NTFS obviously. The harddrive is on a RAID controller, so it doesn't get recognised by most DOS-utilities. My system partition is fine, the 200GB partition with my documents and foto's and such has the problem.

How this happend: I have no clue. It started maybe two weeks ago when I found that when I deleted some download the folder just stayed there, sometimes with vague errors, sometimes nothing. Things got annoying enough to try to fix it 3 days ago when I couldn't copy new files anymore.

I had been running chkdsk from the GUI and rebooting since the problem started, where it would always find a couple of broken indexrecords, and then claim my MFT-BITMAP was incorrect. But it would always say there wasn't enough free space to repair the MFT (there is about 30GB free).

Later I tried to run chkdsk from cmd.exe in Windows, which was a much better expirience at first. I didn't ask me to reboot as it just locked the volume, and did not complain about free space problems and fixed the problems. I ran it again and it still didn't find anything. So I thought the problem was solved.

It turns out chkdsk just fixes broken files by deleting them, which among who knows what made my whole documents folder vanish. Not cool. Fortunatly I was able to recover most of it with my Vista backup (very incomplete) and some recovery utilities (Active@). But I still sometimes find that there's now one song missing from some album I ripped and stuff like that.

Anyway, it turns out the problems weren't even fixed by that, running chkdsk now always brings up some broken files, BITMAP problems, and it says it fixed them. But running chkdsk again just repeats the proces.

How can I fix my filetable?

Greetings,

Bas

.



Relevant Pages

  • Re: Found the chkdsk log [STOP error, data unviewable etc...]
    ... The type of the file system is NTFS. ... CHKDSK is recovering lost files. ... 33013543 KB total disk space. ... partition, etc. Oh well... ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.file_system)
  • Re: HDD size reporting errors. 1 Gb instead of 80
    ... like something got messed up with the partition table. ... For chkdsk /f, you can ... What can be done to repair this problem. ... it now reports hard drive sizing error. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: chkdsk error
    ... When you run CHKDSK /f on a partition with open files (drive cannot be ... This should ALWAYS occur on the system partition. ... Defrag or by CHKDSK? ... "Gary S. Terhune" wrote: ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: CHKDSK SYS3175 error?
    ... a run on a 2GB HPFS hard disk partition. ... I note there were two IBM APAR's that address failure of CHKDSK with Warp 4 like this, including one with floppy disk booted systems. ... From that point with the hard disk booted system, I was able to drop to an OS/2 command window. ...
    (comp.os.os2.setup.storage)
  • Re: Check Disk
    ... required chkdsk on that partition on each reboot. ... I ran the 'Enable Check Disk Upon Boot' to re-enable auto ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain)