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General discussion

System Volume Information Corrupt

Aug 19, 2006 3:10AM PDT

Hi, I'm having a problem with my Hard Drive.

I'm running an XP Pro SP2 machine with an 80GB Maxtor as the Master, a 250GB Samsung as the Primary Slave, and a 250GB Maxtor on an Ultra133 TX2 IDE controller Card. The issue is with the 250 on the controller card.

In the process of writing files to the drive, several messages popped up saying that different System Volume Information files were corrupt. The drive was no longer readable/writable but still showed up in both My Computer and Disk management as an NTFS drive.

Solution Attempt 1:
I attempted to run chkdsk /r without success. I rebooted my machine and the drive still appeared in Disk Management and My Computer, but no longer as NTFS. Also, no Volume information such as Disk Space, etc were available. It now read as a RAW drive. I tried chkdsk /r and /f once again, now only in Safe Mode with Command Prompt. This was still unsuccsessful.

Solution Attempt 2:
I thought this may be a Windows exclusive issue, so I grabbed my handy Bactrack Security Suite Live Linux CD (SLAX). I explored a bit with Konquerer and the shell and found that /mnt/hdg1 (The HD in question) was there, but again, I was having the same issues as in Windows. Frustrated to no wnd at this point, I tried a diferent tactic.

Solution Attempt 3:
I finally caved and bought Recover My Files http://www.recovermyfiles.com/ as this program showed the most promise and seemingly had the best reviews. I would have gone the linux route and used the Forensic Utilities Backtrack has, but my unfamiliartity with the shell and linux in general lead me to the decision to go a Windows oriented route. Well, there's both good and bad news. Recover My Files found all of the files on the disk, and even in their native directories. However, it wouldn't repair the System Volume Information files, and would only recover the data to another drive or DVD. Worse, it will only recover them as Recovered_file_01.*. * being the file extension of what I'm trying to recover.

I've been on Google and Microsoft Knowledge base, as well as others and I'm stuck. I can't find a solution to this anywhere, and don't have another drive to back these files up to. I'm also positive that there is a way to fix this, I'm just not sure how. Would someone please help me? I'll give you all the info I can. Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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System Volume Information Corrupt
Aug 19, 2006 6:46AM PDT

At the suggestion of a friend I also checked event viewer for errors. There are a number of errors from the time when the crsh occured, and nothing previous to that. It didnt tell me anything I didn't already know. I also swapped the it with the Primary slave. Same complications. I tried another chkdsk /f and /r:

C:\Documents and Settings\wifileecher>chkdsk /r G:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted.

C:\Documents and Settings\wifileecher>chkdsk /f G:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted.

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The recovery houses?
Aug 19, 2006 8:15AM PDT

ontrack.com has some software you can try to see if theirs work. And drivesavers.com has their system.

But what most discover is their repairs make it worse.

Bob

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Okay... Now tell me something I don't know.
Aug 19, 2006 10:49PM PDT

Look, I'm not looking for a piece of software to "make it all better", I'm trying to find someone that actually knows how to repair the system volume information. Thanks Happy

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That would be ontrack and drivesavers.
Aug 20, 2006 1:10AM PDT

I have a buddy that dives in and can edit file allocation tables but he's always busy and charges a few hundred per hour for his services.

The ontrack software is free and would tell you if it would work.

Why not?

I didn't re-read the entire thread but I NEVER had to repair the system volume information (read http://www.theeldergeek.com/system_volume_information_folder1.htm ) since that's just part of Windows. I did run into a toasted OS last year and to save some of their work without reinstalling the entire system I put the drive as a slave and deleted that directory, ran chkdsk and got lucky that a repair install of XP brought it back, but the damage was quite odd. The bottom line was they were a P2P user and took a hit.

Bob