Recover NTFS file table on a busted HD?

[Yossarian]

Hi there,

A colleague has an external drive with tens of gigs of 'stuff'.

I'm not sure *exactly* what he was doing but something went wrong and now when he plugs it into a PC, it reports as needing a format and he is unable to get access to his files.

He found a program on the web (sorry, I've forgotton the name) that copied the raw formatted data onto his working disk internally to his machine. this program ran through all his files and restored them but whilst it has recovered the file and folder structure, and whilst it has correctly found extensions, it has renamed all folders: "Folder1", "Folder2" etc and similarly files are "file1.jpg", "file2.doc" etc.

now - this is only on the COPIED data on his internal drive. He says the external drive hasn't been altered since crashing.

Does anyone know of any app that can recover the filenames (im thinking - recover the NTFS file system?

I found this thread
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread...highlight=table
and will suggest that program, but any other suggestions you may have would be appreciated.

David

[PackerFanatic]

Odd that the filesystem would get lost/corrupt, but the files would be untouched...

[Yossarian]

I think the (equivilant of) the FAT table was bust. The FAT table on the FAT32 system (different to NTFS) is a list of filenames and their starting address.

without that windows98 couldn't SEE files but they were still there.

This is NTFS and win xp but I think the principle will be the same