I’ve moved all files except one from the original ext4 drive (A) to a newly formatted NTFS drive at destination (B), and then I’ve formatted the drive A by going to the Disk Management on Windows, deleting the volume and the make a new simple volume with a quick format.

After restarting I found out that the destination drive was corrupted.

On Windows I got

Location is not available

G:\ is not accessible.
The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.

On Windows on drive B I used chkdsk g: /f /r /x from an admin cmd but it says:

Corrupt master file table. Windows will attempt to recover master file table from disk.
Windows cannot recover master file table. CHKDSK aborted.

On drive A I’ve used sudo fsck.ext4 -vy /dev/xxx to recover the ext4 file system. I got a single file back which was the only one I didn’t move.

How should I attempt to recover the files in the drive?

The first software I tried on drive B was Recuva. I got a Warning saying

Failed to scan the following drives:
A:: Invalid data run detected

Resources

  • @The_Lemmington_PostOPM
    1•4 months ago

    The error messages you’re receiving indicate that the NTFS file system on the drive has become corrupted, and the master file table (MFT) – which is a critical component that stores metadata about files and directories – is damaged. Unfortunately, when the MFT is severely corrupted, Windows’ built-in chkdsk utility is often unable to repair it.

    However, there are third-party data recovery tools that may be able to recover your files from the corrupted NTFS drive. These tools use advanced algorithms and techniques to scan the drive sector by sector, searching for file signatures and reconstructing the file system structure.

    Here are a few recommended data recovery tools you could try:

    1. TestDisk and PhotoRec (Free, open-source): TestDisk is a powerful tool that can attempt to repair damaged file systems, including NTFS. If it fails to repair the file system, you can use its companion tool PhotoRec to recover files directly from the drive.

    2. Stellar Data Recovery (Paid): Stellar Data Recovery is a commercial data recovery suite that includes tools for recovering data from corrupted NTFS drives. It has a solid reputation and decent success rates.

    3. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard (Paid): Another popular commercial data recovery tool that can recover data from corrupted NTFS drives.

    4. R-Studio (Paid): A professional-grade data recovery tool that can handle various types of file system corruption and data loss scenarios.

    Before using any data recovery tool, it’s crucial to create a byte-by-byte copy (image) of the corrupted drive first. This will ensure that the tool works on a copy rather than the original drive, reducing the risk of further data loss. You can use tools like ddrescue (Linux/macOS) or ImageX (Windows) to create a drive image.

    Once you have a drive image, you can attempt data recovery using the tool of your choice. Keep in mind that the success rate of data recovery depends on the extent of the corruption and the tool’s capabilities.