I recently decided to install gentoo on my box, I was happily following the instructions when I got to the point where you had to create filesystems on the partitions you just made. I (rather stupidly) ran mke2fs on my Windows NTFS partition I didn't actually realise I'd done it at the time so it ran to completion. I have just recently formatted the drive containing my NTFS partition reinstalled XP on it and restored all my stuff from a backup (which was on the drive I then used for installing gentoo, so I can't get my files back from there). This means that there should be little fragmentation on the partition and so most of the files should be contiguous on the disk (I hope). So does anyone know how I could go about restoring the data on that drive? I wouldn't mind too much if I lost it all but I would like to get at least some of it back.

Good luck.

Your only hope short of paying money for pros to do it is to see if ntfsdebug (or debugfs.ntfs? something like that) is capable of getting around the "corruption." Unlikely.

Yeah I thought it would be something like that. I thought NTFS kept a copy of all the vital data at the beginning of the disk (i.e. the stuff that contains your directory and file structure) in case it got corrupted? Maybe I was wrong.

Ahh well I'll have a look at ntfsdebug see if I can salvage anything.

Quote: Original post by Monder
I thought NTFS kept a copy of all the vital data at the beginning of the disk (i.e. the stuff that contains your directory and file structure) in case it got corrupted?

yeah i'm pretty sure it does but "I have just recently formatted the drive containing my NTFS partition" so now, if it was there, it's gone. sad. someone can probably recover some data from the drive if you pay them good money.

-me

Yeah I formatted the partition and then put a new NTFS filesystem on it. The formating isn't what killed the partition, calling mke2fs (thus creating an ext2 FS) on it is what killed the drive.

mke2fs didn't take that long to execute so I guess it didn't actually wipe the drive (in the Windows XP setup the long ntfs format which I guess does wipe the drive took around an hour compared to the 4-5 minutes mke2fs took).

I don't care enough about the data to pay money to actually recover it really (well not the amount professional data recovery firms charge anyway). I'll look around the net for more info on NTFS recovery, I've got plenty of time to waste [smile].