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I'm testing my friends external HDD, which can't be accessed on Windows 7 - it installs as USB device, but does not mount. On linux, SMART readings show, that the disk has too many bad sectors, but I can still mount it and read the files (didn't try writing). I've started reading files using find . -type f and dd if={} of=/dev/null -bs=256k and I've found just a few files with I/O Errors. Unfortunately, there's also at least one path, that did not exist in the directory before (corrupted MFT).

Question is: What is the proper way to fix such partition corruption without losing data (apart from the already corrupted) and make it mountable on windows, so it wouldn't need linux to copy the data from?

mrówa
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First since you can mount it, copy the critical files to another hdd first.

Boot from Windows 7 install CD. After selecting English and US on the next screen select repair Then command prompt.

chkdsk /R c:

When finished reboot and see what happens.

If important files are damaged by bad sectors buy SpinRite from grc.com and run that. If you have a lot of bad sectors this program will take a crazy amount of time to run, but it works. I have had disk with a lot and lots of bad sectors run for a month.

cybernard
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