Step Six: Make File System Repairs

It some cases the file system has been damaged, especially when all of the sectors from a crashed drive have not been fully recovered. In this case, we must look for file system errors and make sure there is no slippage within the volume. We also have to make sure that all essential parts of a file system are present and correct. Take NTFS for instance. When you format a volume using NTFS, Windows creates a master file table $MFT and metadata files. The $MFT is a relational database that consists of rows of file records and columns of file attributes. It contains at least one entry for every file on an NTFS volume, including the $MFT itself. Small files less than about 1.5 KB are stored completely inside the $MFT resulting in the optimal one I/O operation to access the complete file with all attributes. We can use this information to match up these MFT files with the actual file it is referencing. To match up every file would take years in some instances, so this is why we have written a program to verify the top ten file systems in use today. Once this process is complete, we are ready for the final step, and that is simply to copy the data.

Back to RAID Recovery