directory structure missing

[xortam]

Booted up my XP system yesterday and found that a secondary NTFS volume somehow got corrupted and shows no data. Chkdsk shows there is still plenty of files there but didn't find any problem (ran without '/f').

The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Local Disk 2.

WARNING!  F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

 293033600 KB total disk space.
 271095548 KB in 2248 files.
      1472 KB in 1016 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
     78996 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
  21857584 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
  73258400 total allocation units on disk.
   5464396 allocation units available on disk.

I've got 280 GB of non backed-up video on there and I really don't want to lose it so I want the best shot at recovering it without experimenting. Should I try a "chkdsk /f" from a command window? "chkdsk /p" from the recovery console? Other free util? What's the current thinking on this?

[Taz]

Have you got another drive you can Ghost it onto before you attempt a repair?

[xortam]

That's not a bad idea but I have neither ghost nor another drive quite that big (they're all full anyway). I may invest in those if there isn't another solution. I was hoping there might be a utility that would show me the proposed repair (directory structure) before actually writing to the disk. It would be really nice to be able to access the data on disk using the proposed fixup before committing to the change.

[MultimediaMan]

Go over to Winternals and register for a 10 day emergency copy of ERD2005 Admin Pack...you can recover nearly anything with that, and it WILL preview what it has found.

[xortam]

Go over to Winternals and register for a 10 day emergency copy of ERD2005 Admin Pack...you can recover nearly anything with that, and it WILL preview what it has found.

Am I reading this right? They want $499 for a 7 day emergency download, applicable to a full license later? That's out of my ball park.

Fry's has a sale on for 500 GB drives at $189 and also ghost/pm/inet security for $40 ($20 if as an upgrade). I think I might run out and pick these up.

[xortam]

BTW ... the message I got in the Event Viewer was "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume G." I was accessing that volume fine the night before and shutdown was normal. Makes me worry about the drive itself (a Seagate S-ATA).

[MultimediaMan]

You likely have lost the MFT, so Windows wrote a new one... I think the Emergency version of the disk is free for personal use.

[xortam]

Tell me more ... how?
The system shut down the night before with an explorer window open to one of the subdirectories on that volume. I got the alert about a missing path when I booted up the next day. Some how the volume got corrupted during shutdown or the next bootup. I'll see if there's a drive exerciser available for that drive once I resolve this but I fear I can't trust the drive itself anymore. This would be the first drive that's ever gone bad on me.