Article contains information on master file table corruption and there causes of corruption. Also gives solution to solve this problem.

Master File Table (MFT) is a relational database that contains information about all files and folders stored in an NTFS (New Technology File System) volume. Corruption in MFT primarily occurs due to metadata structure damage, file system corruption, software bugs and more. Two major issues that you might encounter after MFT corruption are unbootable hard drive partition and data inaccessibility. In such situations, backup acts as a boon to completely recover and restore your inaccessible data. However, if no backup is available or backup falls short of providing necessary information, then you need to use advanced Partition Recovery tools to recover and restore your lost data.

Consider a practical scenario, when you attempt to boot the system, you receive the below error message:

"C:\$MFT is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the chkdsk utility."

The hard drive partition becomes inaccessible after the above error message appears. Furthermore, you encounter the same error message each time you attempt to boot the system using the hard drive.

Cause:

The root cause for the occurrence of the above error message is MFT corruption.

Solution:

To resolve the above issue and access the hard drive partition data, you need to follow these steps:

• Use another copy of MFT to boot from the hard drive. NTFS always maintains a duplicate copy of MFT on the hard drive.
• As suggested in the error message, use CHKDSK utility from Recovery Console to repair the file system. However, use of this utility may result as the occurrence of below error message:

"CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the master file table

(MFT) bitmap. CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.

Windows found problems with the file system.

Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these."

If both the above measures fail to resolve the issue, then you need to reinstall the operating system. A clean reinstall erases all data from the hard drive partition. In such data loss scenarios, you need to use advanced Partition Recovery tools. Such recovery applications completely recover the lost data by incorporating high end scanning methods. These recovery tools work as self-explanatory utilities due to their largely graphical interface and to-the-point documentation.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the most effective Partition Recovery tool. This Partition Recovery Software provides complete recovery from formatted, deleted, lost or corrupted partitions and volumes. It is compatible with FAT16, FAT32, vFAT, NTFS and NTFS5 file systems. This Partition Recovery utility supports Windows Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000.

Biography:-Author researching on the error (like MFT is corrupt and unreadable) which occurred when partition corrupted. Author tells the causes of occurring errors gives solutions of partition recovery and suggested to use partition recovery software to recover that lost data.