Not a drive that had died — a drive that had started lying. Documents opened and displayed unreadable characters, some folders had vanished, and error messages appeared on files that had been fine the week before.
A business kept reports, spreadsheets and financial records on a Seagate Momentus 2.5-inch IDE drive — the kind of ageing laptop disk that ends up in an external caddy long after the machine it came from was retired. The symptoms were confusing rather than alarming: some files opened and showed garbled text, some threw error messages, and a few folders had simply stopped appearing.
Nothing was clicking and nothing sounded wrong, which is precisely why the drive kept being used for a fortnight before anyone treated it as a failure.
The drive was mechanically sound — no noise, no spin-up trouble, no head symptoms. The problem was in the file system: the Master File Table, which holds a record for every file on an NTFS volume describing its name, size and the clusters holding its contents, had been partially damaged.
Bad sectors had formed in the region holding those records. That explains the pattern exactly: where a record survived, the file opened; where the record was damaged, the file either failed or pointed at the wrong clusters and returned nonsense. The file contents themselves were largely untouched a few tracks away.
Repairing the file system in place would have been the obvious move and the wrong one. chkdsk produces a consistent file system by discarding what it cannot reconcile, and on a drive with bad sectors in the MFT it would have deleted the very records needed to rebuild the structure.
The drive was imaged sector by sector first, with bad sectors bypassed safely and logged rather than retried indefinitely. From that image the file system was reconstructed manually: surviving MFT records were read directly, the backup copy of the table was located and merged in where the primary was damaged, and fragmented files spanning damaged regions were reassembled from their remaining fragments.
Recovered documents and spreadsheets were opened in their applications rather than listed, since the whole problem had been files that appeared present and contained nonsense. Financial records were checked against the business’s own expectations of what should exist.
About 98% recovered, including all business documents, financial records and project files. The shortfall was confined to files whose contents sat in the same bad-sector region as their records — a small number, and identified by name rather than quietly returned as damaged copies.
When files open and show nonsense, the records describing where their contents live are usually damaged rather than the contents themselves. The one thing that makes it permanent is running a repair tool: chkdsk achieves consistency by discarding what it cannot reconcile, including records a recovery would have rebuilt. Single drives from £300 +VAT.
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Usually damage to the Master File Table, the NTFS structure holding a record for every file. Where a record survives the file opens correctly; where it is damaged the file may point at the wrong clusters and return nonsense. The contents themselves are often intact.
Not before the data is safe. chkdsk produces a consistent file system by deleting or truncating records it cannot reconcile — and on a drive with bad sectors in the MFT, those are exactly the records a recovery would have rebuilt.
Because the record describing that folder could not be read. The files inside are usually still on the disk and recoverable by rebuilding the table from its backup copy or by carving them out by signature.
From £300 plus VAT for a single drive after a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quote, with most jobs no fix, no fee.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.