Correcting tree from messed up file tree in NTFS partition

Posted by Fullmooninu on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Fullmooninu
Published on 2012-11-12T04:26:38Z Indexed on 2012/11/12 5:03 UTC
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It's a real messed situation, but I'm quite at the end of my options.

It's my personal hardrive, so it's very important for me, and yes, I have no backup =(

The short story:

1) I have two discs. One with Windows, and another where I had a bit of empty space at the front of the disk, so i could install Linux. The rest was occupied by a 1.8TB NTFS partition filled with data.

2) I installed Linux, and after a while realized there was not enough space for everything, so I tried using Gparted, and told it to re-size the NTFS partition, to a lesser size.

3) The system jammed. I had to reboot and broke the Resizing operation.

Here's what I did to fix it:

a) Rebooted into Linux Live, and used Testdisk,to deep analyze the disk, and recover the possible partitions. It found several versions of the NTFS partitions, probably made during the resizing. I told Testdisk to open every one of them, and only one could list its files. When trying to open the other options on Testdisk, it showed an error message. I assumed the one without errors, to be the correct one, and I told Testdisk to recover the partition, and write a new MBR.

b) The partition had errors, and Linux has a NTFS fixing tool, used it, but the system still had errors.

c) So I booted into windows and use chkdsk to correct all errors in the partition.

d) Everything seems fine, but now, back in Windows, when I open one file, it opens another file, or part of another file. As in, some files took up the position of other files.

What I think happened is that I recovered an old tree, and not the most current one. And that one just happened to be intact, while the most recent one was damaged. As such, the files that were moved during the failed resizing, were now, during the automatic correction, assumed wrongly to be in their correct places.

So when I open a file, it tries to open another one. Radiohead - Creep.mp3 will open and it will actually be a bit from another song, or even code from a jpg. Some files seem to be all right, but others have seemed to have had their position taken by others.

Anyone knows of something really powerful that can help me solve this?

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