Failure when updating system partitions
A common tool used to change a PC configuration is one that modifies the partition area of the disk, enlarge, or sometimes shrink a partition. Occasionally, these tools can fail when running and leave the PC in a very unstable condition. Recovery is possible, but it can be difficult, and so the following guide is for experienced users only.
Stage 1
If the failure has happened at the start or end of the repartition, then teh only error may be the partition sector needs to be rebuilt. For this the Partition Analysis tool will assist and recover the correct files.
Stage 2
If the partition program fails in the middle of a repartition the situation can arise where there are valid MFTs but they point to different areas of the disk, with the same pointers. The MFT uses a series of pointers to point to a particular sector, relative to the start of the partition. As partitions are moved, the start of the partition will be changed and so parameters have to be set to fool the program into pointing to the correct area.
The first operation will be to try a normal recover, using the Recover from file entries. By checking the signatures in the log, it will probably be seen that the start of the end of the log shows valid signatures, but other parts of the log have failed. The difficult stage is to now find where the correct files are. A technique can can be used is to do a raw scan of the drive and look for jpg files. Each jpg file will have a specific size and can be viewed. Thus is in the standard recover there is a jpg file of length 5287 bytes, the raw image log can be viewed to find a jpg with the same length. If there are multiple files with the same size, often the correct one can be determined by viewing the file (this is one reason to use jpgs).
It now needs careful use of details in the logs to determine where the file is, and where the operating system thinks it is. This difference needs to be changed in the NTFS parameters for the disk, and the program rerun. Recover of files will often require recovery in different stages, and for this the Select MFT range will be used