re: Restore Corrupted partition
Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 8:52 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by C K
(6910 messages posted)
Actually, even a well burned CD has an expected "real" life safely estimated at 3-5
years if stored properly. Past that, even if it "lives" another 20-90 years, you
have no idea when it will fail. Some fail after a week of being burned in my experience,
and the CD/DVD needs to be recorded to archival specs which, no typical user knows
about or does. Even then, you have no way of anticipating that any disc has a bad
spot, especially in the TOC (Table Of Contents) that can also lose your data, requiring
still another recovery program. It can verify OK and in some situations, it could
fail a short time later.
Lesson that we old timers have learned (since I also work with large digital media
files) is that I back up to two or more external drives and two sets of DVDR's.
As for trying to fix your HDD.. The structure has been corrupted. That means that
the FAT, (yes, NTFS has one basically, as does every file system) was being changed,
the slack removed or added to match the cluster/sector length etc etc data being
moved where needed. There is a lot that goes on, not just changing the boot sectors/record
or the partition table. You would need to have a hard copy of the address of every
bit of data, then totally verify and rearrange them back into the structure and addressing
they were before. (rebuild the FAT AND the partition table, and the boot sectors
etc)
Needless to say, since humans work at a snails pace compared to a computer moving
at a seemingly speed of light, your decsendents would still be working on it probably,
after you trained them in how a drive works, and programming, and that's after the
learning curve that you yourself would have to go through. By that time, we (humans)
either won't be around anymore or the technology will have changed so much that HDD's
will be in a museum (if any of them are still around)...
NTFS is well known to have these issues, and is why the makers of Partition Magic
(before snortin' Norton purchased them and ruined a fairly decent utility) recommended
that NTFS be converted to FAT32 before resizing. Any compression and security had
to be removed as that most likely would cause a failure in the resizing process.
Possible then with 200-300 gig drives but with todays drives, the bigger they are,
the higher the chances that they will corrupt no matter how good or bullet proof
the vendor says it is.
Now you know why it is easier for the recovery program to off load the files it finds,
with still no guarantee that any of them will be "whole" files depending on the level
of corruption. It also had no "reference" of where all those bytes were before the
operation started, so no way to put them back where they were and rewrite the tables
or the FAT. There is no way to verify a file is complete. They only give you a
statistical chance. Even the professional software programs can't totally restore
a drive once this has happened. Sometimes if the backup tables are good and match
the structure, then a program can fix it and you are on your way, but they still
recommend that you move your files to another drive, repartition and format the drive
before you use it or trust it.
Now you know! LOL Good Luck!
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