Backup shows no folders
Hi,
I have TI Home 11 and Win XP Pro and an external 500 GB HD with bad sectors (maybe because it fell down eight months ago - nevertheless it worked faultless till last week and then got worse every 2nd hour.) I used to store there all my 1:1 backup copies which I wanted to access directly without the long Acronis procedure. I made no backup of that backup, but there are files on it which I really need and which I have nowhere else. (Yes, I know what I should have done!)
This bad HD still shows folders and files with their size but one cannot open them anymore, and the explorer complains every 30 seconds that it cannot read all the files any more, and something with HD-Letter:\$mft.
So I bought another 500 GB HD and made a complete image of that disk which took all night. I checked the "read sector-for-sector-box". But I had to skip all the bad sectors because Acronis could not read them at all.
Now, the mybackup.tib indicates a size of 3.5 GB which does not look too bad - from outside. I tried to recover the content to a third hard disk (the bootable HD inside the PC) where I have about 150 GB left, and checked "I want to recover single folders and files".
But when I open the mybackup.tib, the program does not show single folders of that tib. It wants to be recovered entirely. When I try that, Acronis TI 11 says goodbye and Microsoft keeps stubbornly asking me if I want to announce the crash to them.
What is wrong and what could I do?
I am just trying a workaround - I just copied the 3.5 mybackup.tib to my intern HD, deleted everything on the external disk and do the recovering now vice versa, and this seems to work. As this takes a very long time, I will inform you tomorrow if that brought a desired result.
My workaround did not work. When I try to open what has been restored on my disk I get something like "cannot be read" and when I try to find lost data with a forensic software (trial), it says G:\$mft is missing. Whatever that is.
If anybody knows what that means, your advice is welcome.
$mft is the Master File Table which is the table that describes the location of every file and folder on the volume. Without it, everything else is useless.
I am not aware of any disaster recovery program that will directly read data out of the tib. The best you can hope for is to recover the archives with a data recovery program and then extract whatever data was recovered. However, given the way the data may be stored in the archive it may be fruitless. It sounds like your disk has gone bad in the MFT which is the worse but not surprising since the heads spend a lot of time there.
For others (since you know the pain), if you have a disk showing bad sectors then it needs to be either thrown out or closely monitored and when more appear then throw it out. Any disk that has been dropped is very suspect and drive manufacturers say that a common cause of early failures in HDs is due to improper handling in shipping. Some laptop disks have accelerometers in them to detect excessive shock.