Mounting possibly corrupt NTFS

[sparx_au]

Hi everyone,

I am a nocturnal windows user - Linux by day (at work) and Windows by night (at home because the wife will not use anything but).

Anyway, we try to boot the home computer (with XP on it) one day and it gets caught in an eternal 'splash screen' -> reboot -> 'splash screen' -> reboot -> 'splash screen' -> reboot -> ...... well you get the idea.

I think - oh yes - i'll grab the knoppix CD and pull the data off it, and re-install an OS (possibly leveraging this incident as a reason to move the home PC towards linux) and put the data back on.

When i try to mount it through KDE it doesn't work. When i try to mount it through the shell with "mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /MNT" (yup - created /MNT before hand) I get the following error message:

"$MFT LCN (786432) $MFTMirr LCN (19535036) is greater than the number of clusters (9770398 )"

I searched google to find that this is probably a message spat out by the ntfs driver for mount (super.c?!) but i must admit this is a little beyond me.

Any help with being able to access the data off this HDD before i trash it would be GREATLY appreciated.

Many thanks guys

[sparx_au]

Just some additional information - i was playing around and noticed the ntfs* set of tools. I tried to use ntfsfix (as well as some of the other tools) and I get the following message:

"Mounting volume... Failed to parse NTFS bootsector: Invalid argument
blah blah blah
Volume is corrupt - you should run chkdsk".

Hmmm. keeps talking about the bootsector - i'm not actually trying to boot from it though. I wonder if the best thing to do is to try slapping the little fella into an external enclosure and trying it on another windows box... this options isn't available to me at the moment though.

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Execute this

mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /MNT -o defaults,force,umask=0
ls /MNT

Post exact error message here.

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Execute this

mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /MNT -o defaults,force,umask=0
ls /MNT

Post exact error message here.

[sparx_au]

Hi Devils Casper,

Thanks for the welcome

I tried as you asked and got the following message:

"$MFT LCN (786432) $MFTMirr LCN (19535036) is greater than the number of clusters (977039
Failed to startup volume: Invalid Argument
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1' : Invalid Argument
The device '/dev/sda1' doesn't have a valid NTFS
Maybe you selected the wrong device? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/hda, not /dev/hda1)? Or the other way around?"

Is this looking bleak?

[devils casper]

Post the output of fdisk -l command here.

[sparx_au]

Here you go mate:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160040803840 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4866 39081592+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 40.0 GB, 40019582464 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 4864 39070048+ 7 HPFS/NTFS


(its sda1 that i'm mainly after)