Corrupted disk structure, tried repair, only found one partition.

I'm running windows 10 on a Samsung 250gb SSD.
Along with it I have two 500gb seagate hard drives, each partitioned in half. Giving me 4 separate volumes from the OS which I used for games, music, picture, etc.

A couple of nights ago, I woke up to notice that windows had run a scheduled update and was now restarting, but was stuck at 0% running a check disk on one of the volumes that belonged to one of the Seagate drives. One of the partitions on this drive was for my steam games folder. However I can't remember what exactly was on the other sister volume. As it was the middle of the night and the check disk was not advancing any further after a good half an hour I turned off the PC in case the hard drive was failing so I could take a look at it later.

Later being today, the first thing I did was go into the disk management utility built into windows, where I quickly noticed that the drive is flagged as an Invalid Disk. A quick search led me to a tutorial that instructed to download a hex editor and look for a value of 42 in Sector 0 under line 1C0 and changing it to 07.

Which I did, but the tutorial also instructed to look elsewhere for the same value under other lines in case the drive had several partitions, which is my case, however I couldn't not find the value in the other lines it suggested, and just changing all instances of the 42 value throughout the whole drive doesn't seem safe.

The problem I'm having is that the fix from the tutorial only partially worked, as the drive is no longer getting flagged as invalid, but windows still doesn't recognize the drive properly; it lists it as a RAW partition. Doing some more searching here led me to download MiniTool Partition Wizard.

I ran the scan and it was able to find one of the volumes that was previously there, which I'm guessing is the first volume on the drive and was flagged as active or fixed by the hex edit from the tutorial. I closed the partition wizard without making any changes because it advised it would delete the missing partition as it saw it as unallocated space in order to activate the one it found.

My question is; should I go ahead and do what the tutorial suggests and change all instances of the value 42 with the hex editor, and then run the partition wizard to see if the other volume is found, or is there another tool that will help me unlock the other partition?

Here's what I got after I ran it.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>CHKDSK E: /f /v /r /x
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is SG-01.
Corrupt master file table. Windows will attempt to recover
master file table from disk.
Windows cannot recover master file table. CHKDSK aborted.

Is there a utility or way to rebuild the master file table?

Hi neoplasm,

1. Please post the link to the tutorial you mentioned suggesting to look for a value of 42 in Sector 0 under line 1C0 and changing it to 07. I have to assess whether this could have led to the Corrupt MFT. Did you save the original Sector 0, before you modified it?

2. Partition Wizard: Please upload the following screenshots:
a) The first screen that appears when you launch PW showing all your drives.
b) Run Partition Recovery Wizard Quick Scan on the corrupt 500GB Seagate drive and post the
screenshot of the found partitions.
c) Next do a Full Scan - which may take quite sometime - and post the screenshot of Found
Partitions.

And yes, Cancel the operation at the end and do not make any changes.

3. We do have some definite information as a result of the checkdisk run - Corrupt Master File Table.We shall see how to deal with it after the above inputs.

Upload the screenshots to SevenForum Servers. Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

Also post an untruncated screenshot of Windows Disk Management following the guidelines here, Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

Hello thanks for helping me out.

Here is the link to the tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQgRkEuFQac

I did not save the sector before editing as I was not able to make the drive accessible before the edit, and I was not familiar with the features of the editor.

a)


b)


c)


DM)

A quick question now before you retire for the day. ( I shall write a detailed post later which you can see tomorrow morning. You are almost 12 hours behind me. My morning is your previous day night.)

You said you have two 500GB drives each partitioned into two. But I see only one in all the screenshots. What about the other?

Thanks you're right I'm about to retire for the night. Hope you have a good day.
Look forward to reading your follow up tomorrow morning.

I disconnected that drive when I first started to diagnose the issue. I didn't want to confuse myself by having that other drive in there.

My observations:

1. Though Partition Wizard shows one Partition/ drive E: NTFS 232.88 GB Used 100% and another Unallocated 232.88GB, Windows Disk Management shows the full volume E: 465.76GB, as RAW. So Check disk ran on the full volume - not appropriate when we know that there were two volumes in it - and for that reason I shall reject its finding.( There were two volumes and two MFTs. Which MFT did it tackle? )
No action is required on your part on this observation. Just confirm that the WDM screenshot is the current one and not one taken much earlier/ prior to the PW screenshot/prior to running checkdisk.

2. Action required: Run PW PRW Quickscan again. When it shows the found partition as in your screenshot b) in your post #7, just doubleclick on that line (as instructed in that Window) and check whether it shows all your files. Post a screenshot.



Cancel after you take the screenshot without making any changes.

Will continue after a breather.