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mrmoderateFlag for United States of America

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Must fix corrupted MFT of data disc in WinXP

CHKDSK (WinXP version) tells me that the MFT of my computer's data disc has been corrupted.  HOW DO I GO ABOUT FIXING THIS?

Details about PC structure and problem:

This PC has 2 hard drives, D: (for data files only) and C: (for everything else).  The D: drive is the one with the problem.  I'm running Windows XP Media Center Edition.  There are around 7 Windows user accounts set up on this PC.  I moved the Favorites, My Documents, and Desktop folders from their usual location (on C:) to folders on the D: drive, one folder (in D: root) for each user.  I made these folders "private" for nearly all users.  Everything's been working just fine.

I've been using Outlook 2007 to move a ton of emails and the contacts from Yahoo to my computer.  Outlook's gotten stuck a bunch of times while exporting said data to a file.  I held in the power button on the PC in most of these cases to force a shutdown.  After the last of these, I could barely get Windows to let me into my user account (whose aforementioned folders were among those moved to D:).  I ran Check Disk for Errors (Automatically fix file system errors checked) on C: and D:.  I got a message that the MFT of the D: drive has been corrupted.  My webcam software keeps trying to reinstall itself.

I tried restarting the PC and logging into the user whose folders have NOT been moved to D:.  The Desktop looks fine, but I'm still getting notices that my Logitech webcam is trying to install.  The D: drive appears in My Computer, but when View is set to Details, nothing appears for the D: drive under disk size (if I recall) or under free space (I'm sure).

Before I moved my data files to this PC about a week ago, I took a bunch of images with Acronis True Image 11 Home.  (This is a new computer, and I took images along the way during the process of installing all of my software.)  I have no images created after I moved all of my data to this PC.  I don't have backups of much of my data files.  I just tried booting to the Acronis product disk and backing up my data files off of D:.  The boot into Acronis worked normally, but, although D: appears as a drive, it has no folders or files as far as Acronis can tell.

I thought about using Acronis to restore D:'s MFT (and maybe the zero sector [or whatever that's called]).  However, I have no idea if this will work, and I thought trying this might make restoring the current MFT impossible.  So, I'm asking for help instead.  I do have the Windows installation disc.  It's a Dell XPS 720 computer.

What should I do???
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AllKnowing1
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run a checkdisk again:
in a command prompt:

chkdsk /f d:


If this doesnt fix the issues, use a file recovery software to get the files back from the drive and reformat. Your master file table is toast.
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ASKER

Thanks for the response so fast.

So I have to boot to DOS?  Or can I do this at the command prompt within Windows?  If the former, how do I boot to DOS?  Both drives are NTFS.
Also, any suggestions about what file recovery software to use?  It doesn't HAVE to be freeware.
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AllKnowing1
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Thanks so much.

I'll leave this question open for a couple of days to see if anybody has any other ideas.