Accidentally used NTFS fix on exFAT external USB HDD, now it's corrupted in Windows

I'm trying to solve another issue with Windows, so I was going to backup my laptop SSD with my hard drive through Ubuntu but it couldn't read it, because it was in exFAT... so I used this command in this video.

The error on my drive was slightly different, with sdd1 instead of sdb1 so I used sdd1 instead, and now my HDD is 'corrupted' in Windows! Ubuntu is now showing it as a usable drive (it's not greyed out) but it had 200GB of stuff on it (I backed up what I believed to be all photos on it yesterday to my desktop thankfully). I think it may simply be because it can't see the stuff, so is there a way I can undo this?

I realise now that I tried to use an NTFS fix on an exFAT hard drive. I hope it hasn't deleted everything. I was simply trying to make the drive usable in Ubuntu and this happened. I'm really worried, so some help would be much appreciated.

2 Answers
2

You got a different problem then you believe.

ntfsfix is a utility that fixes some common NTFS problems. ntfsfix is NOT a Linux version of chkdsk. It only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows.

You may run ntfsfix on an NTFS volume if you think it was damaged by Windows or some other way and it cannot be mounted.

As far as normal usage of ntfsfix goes the most important part of the things it does is that it tells Windows to start a scan of the filesystem on the next boot (that will be independent of the filesystem since this is more like setting a boot option). So if the hard disk has a problem that scan will fail and crash Windows. Maybe that is what you are seeing.

For exFat there is a scanning tool called exfatfsck.

exfatfsck checks an exFAT file system for errors. Note that it cannot repair corrupted FS, it just reports found errors.

But that does nothing other than report problems. It has no options to fix anything.

If your hard disk has problems and it is not formatted NTFS then running ntfsfix is not the cause. Neither of the 2 tools can, from within Linux, destroy your Windows partition.

ntfsfix

Please don't try to fix Windows from outside Windows. Use your Windows installation media to run chkdsk. That tool is intended to repair Windows filesystems.

The answers by @Rinzwind here and in the link

how should I repair exFat data if I run ntfsfix on ubuntu?

are helpful.

You get more details at the following link,

Repair the partition table and file system of a pendrive

Scroll down to the paragraph 'Advanced repair of a partition table, file system and/or recovery of files':

It is a good idea to make a cloned copy and do the recovery work on the cloned copy. That way you need not be afraid to destroy the original drive, if the recovery work goes wrong.

If you want to recover files and TestDisk does not work there is always PhotoRec. It can recover files without a working file system, but it is a lot of work, and you will usually not recover the file names (and not the directory structure), but most common file types can be recovered based on the file content (identifying file headers), as long as they are not overwritten.

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