Looks like I missed this thread earlier and didn’t get a chance to chime in - so I’ll try to summarize @OneClick’s case for anyone who might run into a similar scenario. Having a clear recovery sequence can make all the difference.
@OneClick faced a situation where, after a power loss, his NTFS partition turned into what looked like complete chaos. When he attempted recovery with R-Studio, he ran into bad sectors on the drive and a batch of corrupted files.
The advice that followed in the thread was absolutely on point, and it’s worth outlining the recovery steps here:
- Create a sector-by-sector image of the drive. This is the smartest move you can make. By doing this, you stop all further direct interaction with the failing drive and preserve its current state. Even a single imaging pass puts far less stress on the drive than a recovery scan, since most recovery tools read the disk multiple times using different file search algorithms. Imaging limits the risk and gives you a safer way to proceed.
- Scan the image with multiple data recovery tools. Each tool uses different scanning techniques and detection heuristics, so results vary. In cases like this, it’s best to try several tools. The most effective ones for NTFS recovery (based on both experience and user reports) include: Disk Drill, R-Studio, UFS Explorer. We have a comparison article here - https://www.handyrecovery.com/best-data-recovery-apps.html
- Sometimes recovery succeeds only partially - the files are present, but damaged. At this point, specialized repair tools for different file types come into play. For video files - VLC (built-in AVI repair function), Clever Online Video Repair (online tool, if you have a reference video). For images - Photoshop (in limited cases), JPEG-Repair Toolkit, Aspose. And for archives: DiskInternals ZIP Repair or 7-Zip (sometimes recovers from partially broken archives).
If all this does not help and your important files are still not recovered/repaired, you can contact a professional data recovery service with a damaged disk, and they may be able to get undamaged versions of the files using special tools and techniques.
Would be great to hear how it turned out for @OneClick , but unfortunately, he never came back to update us. Either way, if you follow this path step-by-step, you’ll be in the best possible position to save your files.