NTFS File System Weirdness

Troy_Jollimore · 12-31-2007, 06:22 AM

Someone that works with me has a PC with a 60GB, 80GB and 250GB hard drive. It'd been a few years since he'd done his last format, so he did just that over the weekend. Set up the 80GB as his boot/system drive, the 60GB as a 'download' drive, and the 250GB as storage.

The 250 had been near-maxed out previously with music/videos/etc.

What seems to have happened is that his NTFS MFT (Master File Table) has become corrupted, but not in the usual way. The file pointers are pointing to the wrong files, and the results vary. He can try to open a financials file and get nothing but symbols, which is expected. He probably will get errors as well, although he hasn't run across any yet. What's odd is that he can run a video, say of his son's birthday, and what plays are various random music videos for the exact time duration of the original video...

What are the chances?

I've told him he'll have no end of trouble trying to recover from this, as the file system will assume all is well and won't flag any errors. He's tried the usual things, like full scandisk, etc. I told him he could try changing the drive letter, along with chkdsk /f, but I don't have much hope those will do anything. The one thing I told him NOT to do, defrag, he started this morning before coming to work...

Any suggestions for possibly coming through this unscathed? He fortunately happens to have backups of most everything, but it would be nice to not have to re-DL a lot of it. In my experience, 'fix-it' programs are pretty confuddled when an OS/file system/hardware is convinced there's absolutely nothing wrong...

12-31-2007, 06:22 AM	#1 (permalink)
Troy_Jollimore Registered User Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 10 OS: Windows 2000	NTFS File System Weirdness Someone that works with me has a PC with a 60GB, 80GB and 250GB hard drive. It'd been a few years since he'd done his last format, so he did just that over the weekend. Set up the 80GB as his boot/system drive, the 60GB as a 'download' drive, and the 250GB as storage. The 250 had been near-maxed out previously with music/videos/etc. What seems to have happened is that his NTFS MFT (Master File Table) has become corrupted, but not in the usual way. The file pointers are pointing to the wrong files, and the results vary. He can try to open a financials file and get nothing but symbols, which is expected. He probably will get errors as well, although he hasn't run across any yet. What's odd is that he can run a video, say of his son's birthday, and what plays are various random music videos for the exact time duration of the original video... What are the chances? I've told him he'll have no end of trouble trying to recover from this, as the file system will assume all is well and won't flag any errors. He's tried the usual things, like full scandisk, etc. I told him he could try changing the drive letter, along with chkdsk /f, but I don't have much hope those will do anything. The one thing I told him NOT to do, defrag, he started this morning before coming to work... Any suggestions for possibly coming through this unscathed? He fortunately happens to have backups of most everything, but it would be nice to not have to re-DL a lot of it. In my experience, 'fix-it' programs are pretty confuddled when an OS/file system/hardware is convinced there's absolutely nothing wrong...