MFT is corrupt, cannot read its unmapped extend record

Question

I am running a dual boot installation (Windows 7, Ubuntu 64bit) with a shared NTFS partition. Windows was running over night. I normally shut down the computer the next morning. The other day when I started Ubuntu I noticed that I could no longer access the NTFS partition. This error message appeared.

MFT is corrupt, cannot read its unmapped extend record 42
Note : chkdsk cannot fix this, try ntfsfix

Inode is corrupt (0): Input/output error
Failed to load runlist for $MFT/$DATA.

highest_vcn = 0x3, last_vcn - 1 = 0x371ff
Failed to load $MFT: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sda4': Input/output error

NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

Now I can no longer access the partition neither from Windows nor from Ubuntu.
When started Windows today the partition can be accessed. It is blank except of a bootsqm.dat file left over from a disc check. It looks like as if it has been formatted.

What would you suggest to recover the partition? The tool should respect the existing operating systems including their boot sector, MFT and boot loader, GRUB etc. If it counts in please mind this is a 64bit installation.

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• Similar report: If you understand French please translate any helpful answer here.

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Fun facts: this happened on April 1st; ... record is 42

Solution 1

After more than three weeks of research, trial and error I was able to restore the data of the NTFS partition. The program I used has saved me some years ago. I can honestly recommend it.

GetDataBack for NTFS

It takes quite a while - can be a full day - for the program to analyse the hard disc but in the end I found what I was looking for. A useful and time-saving feature is that you can save the analysis to a file. This allows to start over at this point some other day. The downside is that you need a Windows machine to run the program.
The company also has a new program named "GetDataBack Simple Data Recovery". I cannot tell how well this one works.

Solution 2

I've had great luck recovering data from fouled file systems using Test Disk.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Great product, and you can't beat the price (free).

Good luck!

Comments

[JJD]

Thanks. I was not lucky though.

[0xhughes]

That's no good! The partition recovery software is pretty slick in Test Disk. They also feature a file carving feature as well. Try that. You point it at your hard drive, specify an output folder and it carves for unallocated files based on file signatures. It gets many common file types as well as some more special purpose files as well. This might be useful if you were looking to recover image files or something of that nature.