M Skabialka wrote:
I tried this software with suspect drive in the machine and no other drives.
It recognized that there is a drive in there, tells me the size, says it is
a Windows NTFS disk, but uses a question mark for the drive letter, so that
when I tell it to checkdisk that drive it won't accept ? as a valid
selection, or any other letter of the alphabet.
So close - yet so far....


I found a reference to "chkntfs" here.

http://www.paragon-software.com/busi...nal/index.html

This is the interesting part.

http://www.paragon-software.com/expo...ge/chkntfs.gif

"chkntfs /dev/hdb2 -f"

That implies they're accessing the raw hard drive, without mounting it.
In Unix-land, the "hdb2" means the second partition of disk hdb. If they
said "/dev/hdb", that would reference the whole disk.

The big questions would be

1) Is this software trustworthy ? Is the driver solid enough to trust
with a delicate job like this ?

2) Does this Linux port of chkntfs, understand half of the options
available within NTFS ? For example, if it ran into "streams",
would it handle them properly ?

3) Then there is the possibility of losing the disk, by fooling
around with it. This copy of chkntfs, is going to attempt
to repair the data "in place". I would make a sector by sector
copy of the disk, to another disk first, before trying this.
The Linux "dd" command can do that. And "dd_rescue" can be used,
if the disk has sectors which give CRC errors.

Paragon has a "trial" for the professional version of the above product,
so you could try it out, and see if you can actually recover
the disk with it. But use precautions, so you don't lose the only
copy of the data.

The other bit of fun, is the installation. It looks like GNU
"configure" is running here.

http://www.paragon-software.com/expo...ess_Driver.PNG

I'd have tried this by now, but the thing is, I don't have a
broken NTFS disk to experiment with. So I don't know if me
testing it, would have meaning or not. I mean, if I give it
a disk with is fault free, the software might be horrible
and I wouldn't know it.

*******

I suppose another way to look at this, is whether the Windows
version of chkdsk, would accept a "raw" device specification,
instead of a drive letter (mounted volume).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555302

chkdsk /r

How does it know what the "current disk" is ?

Paul