Power failure during defrag. All files corrupt.

[Barrett Windish]

There was a power failure during defragging my video harddrive. Now all the files are corrupt. Can this be fixed?

[Glenn Chan]

if you have the project file you may be able to re-capture off your DV tapes. Duplicate your project before doing so.

Which NLE are you using? Depending on the way you captured and whether you have TC breaks, this may not be that painful to do.

[Lars Siden]

Hello Barrett,

First of all: Sorry to hear about the file loss.

I'm rather curious - Do you use Win 2000 or XP ? If so, are you using NTFS as filesystem ? If you do - then there shouldn't be any permanent damage to your files. You should be able to fix it with "chkdsk /x /f" from a DOS box ( ie a command prompt in windows )

Best regards,

Lazze Z

[Jim Lafferty]

In the future, make sure to run your box from a UPS -- sorry to read about your problem :(

[Barrett Windish]

I have Windows XP Pro, and I have NTSF file system. I am not familiar with the chkdsk procedure, but I will try it when I get home. Thank you Lazze Z.

For reference I have a Storm Capture Card and edit in Premiere 6.0.

[Rob Lohman]

Chkdsk might fix it indeed. But personally I would much rather
put my faith in recovery tools like Advanced Data Recovery or
GetDataBack from NTFS. They aren't that pricey anymore these
days.

[Barrett Windish]

O.K., I did dskchk but the files still corrupt. Are there any other ideas? Many thanks....

[Lars Siden]

Hello,

Sorry to hear that chkdsk didn't do the trick - which is rather strange since NTFS is a journal keeping filesystem. So in my world I thought it wouldn't be possible to corrupt all files. I mean first of all being a journal keeping FS means that is has a transaction log that it should be able to "roll back" from - secondly: defrag doesn't change all the files at once - maybe 10% of the files is defraged simultaneously and there is at least 2 backups of the file catalogue....

Hope you have better luck with the tools Rob talks about!

// Lazze

[Lars Siden]

Hi again,

Did a quick google on the net and found this:

http://www.file-recovery.net/

I have NOT tested their tools.

http://www.sysinternals.com

They do not offer any repair tools, but many diagnose and info tools.

// Lazze

[Barrett Windish]

I did not see the reply from Rob until after my last post (I guess I was not watching closely.)

Anyway, I am trying Rob's solution. It was running this morning when I left. I will check when I get home. (Thanks Rob!)

If that does not work, I will move forward with your suggestion Lars.

Many thanks.....

[Rob Lohman]

Which application are you running Barrett?

Lars: I wouldn't go as far as to call NTFS a full journeling file
system. But it does keep track of what it is doing and should be
able to rollback.

BUT EVERY file system CAN get corrupted. It all depends on
circumstances. It might even simply be that the HDD controller
received a wrong signal at the moment the power went down
and wrote some garbage to the disk.

[Lars Siden]

Hi Rob,

I won't argue with you about NTFS being this or that.

For more info on what to expect from NTFS please read:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de.../base/ntfs.asp

( watch out for long URL :-)

// Lazze

[Rob Lohman]

Lars: no need for that anyway. I think we are pretty much on
the same page. I already knew about what NTFS did or did not
do, but thanks for that page. Always interesting to read about
it.