Lost MFTs after power loss during GParted partition resize

[tluxon]

On my work PC, I have a 160 GB drive (storage, not boot or O/S) that had two partitions. One was 30 GB at the beginning of the drive and the other was the remainder of the drive. Having had the best of luck with GParted, I decided to delete the smaller first partition using the Disk Management tool in WinXP (Pro SP3) and then boot onto my GParted CD and resize the second larger partition to the beginning of the drive.

Foolishly, I didn't take the time to do a full prior backup, falsely reasoning that it wasn't worth adding over 30 minutes to a 2 or 3 minute job. As luck would have it, less than a minute into the operation there was an interruption of the power to the drive, killing the operation. I was not able to retry or resume as there was now a very messed up MFT.

I already had GetDataBack for NTFS installed on the boot drive, so I started it up and found that there was a recoverable MFT on the drive, but it was only of the files that had been on the originally deleted partition. No MFT was available for the files Ihad intended to keep on the larger partition.

Fortunately, I have a backup of all the mission critical files for my work, but I had many personal files on the drive that had not been backed up. I know the data is intact, but I'm not sure if there's any way to get the long filenames back during the recovery process. If it can't be done, it would be such a daunting task to proper filenames put back on all those files (must be over 60,000 of them!) that I'd probably give up.

Can anyone advise me on what my possibilities are? Can I get those files back with their original names properly associated?

Thank you,
Tim

 

[sturm]

You can try one of the many free hard drive utilities that are out there. They don't rely on partitions to read files. I had good luck with, I believe it was, pc inspector getting files back from a corrupted partition drive.

 

[tluxon]

I am happy to report that I recovered all my data, along with the long filenames and the full directory structure. Thanks to GetDataBack for NTFS!

It turns out that when I initially went into the recovery routine, I selected a route that invoked the "raw file recovery" mode. Apparently, I was unaware that this method would bypass attempts to rebuild an MFT. When the fine support people at Runtime Software requested a step 3 snapshot, I had to start over and chose the default route. This is where I first saw long filenames fly by in the scanning process and I realized I may have a shot at this. In the end, the complete directory structure and all the files were found. I was able to recover them 100% to another drive, and everything is now now where they were intended to be.