Windows 7 Hard Drive Problem

LuftWaffle

Honorable
Jun 2, 2013
19
0
10,510
I reinstalled Windows 7 yesterday. Upon reconnecting another drive which contained my personal files from a previous installation, the startup took ages and the drive became inaccesible after I logged in. I have two partitions on this drive, one containing my files and one containing old program files. The drive containing program files can be accessed just fine.

Here are some observations, deatils and steps I took so far:


  • The drive IS accessible through Linux. In fact, all (or most) of my files are intact.

    chkdsk /r on Windows results in 10% read of the USN Journal, then fails at step 3 of 5. chkdsk /f fails at step 3 of 3, same issue with the USN Journal.

    Right clicking on the "Local Disk" (it used to be called Files) and going to properties is so slow that I'd just stick with the command prompt.

    It's an NTFS drive at 2.5 TB. Not very old.

    This is not a driver issue, since half the drive managed to be recognized. Drivers were also update on reboot and that didn't help.


So my questions are as follows:


  • Am I in for a complete reformat? I have over 400 GB of personal files, and I made the mistake of not backing them up as time went, so I'd try and avoid reformatting at all cost. If it's absolutely necessary, I can try and back up everything useful.

    Would this be a bad sector issue, or a USN issue. If it's an USN issue, is it safe to rebuild a USN Journal on this drive using fsutil, since the old one refuses to be read?