[H-GEN] Help! A power surge ate my partition

[Sarah Walters]

Hi all,

We had a power spike or something similar the other night. Two computers 
came back fine, the third was doing a lot of disk RW at the time and we 
cannot access it. There's some data (mostly digital photos) on it that 
we would really like to retrieve.

I realise this is a little off-topic, as the partition is NTFS, but 
using Linux is the closest we have managed to get to the data and I am 
hoping that someone out there will be able to help.

We have a 120 GB NTFS partition that hangs (black screen) if we try to 
boot from it. If we boot off the Windows XP setup CD it gets as far as 
scanning for hardware, and then hangs in the same way.

I booted off a Gentoo LiveCD (the install disk) that I had lying around, 
and it happily booted. Hooray for Linux for being able to deal 
gracefully with hardware failures. The disk mounts no problem, it 
happily autodetects that it's an NTFS drive and mounts accordingly. 
However, if we actually try to list the directory contents, we hit the 
following code (from 
http://bernia.disca.upv.es/lxr/http/source/fs/ntfs/dir.c#L852).

852                 if (!ntfs_check_index_record <http://bernia.disca.upv.es/lxr/http/ident?i=ntfs_check_index_record>(ino, buf <http://bernia.disca.upv.es/lxr/http/ident?i=buf>)) {
853                         ntfs_error <http://bernia.disca.upv.es/lxr/http/ident?i=ntfs_error>(__FUNCTION__ "(): Index block 0x%x is not "
854                                         "an index record. Returning "
855                                         "-ENOTDIR.\n", *p_high - 1);
856                         ntfs_free <http://bernia.disca.upv.es/lxr/http/ident?i=ntfs_free>(buf <http://bernia.disca.upv.es/lxr/http/ident?i=buf>);
857                         return -ENOTDIR <http://bernia.disca.upv.es/lxr/http/ident?i=ENOTDIR>;
858                 }

I assume this means that my partition table is very sick. Can anyone 
recommend any tools (Linux/DOS boot disk/FreeBSD all fine) that might 
allow me to pull off the data?

Incidentally, does anyone know what would cause this behaviour, and 
should I assume that the hard drive is now unreliable and replace it?

Thanks heaps,
Sarah Walters