MFT corrupt & more

[JAZ]

I've been having real trouble with my 2 Western Digital 120gb 8mb drives, firstly the main one (drive c: 25gb and d: 85gb) has been making clicking sounds every so often for the last 2 weeks and I have found it hard to even get into windows.
Its been running really slow as well but has worked (not crashed) for the last day, as soon as it started showing these symptoms I started putting backups of files onto the other 120gb drive (f: 111gb) but now this drive has mucked up as well, I booted the otherday and it gave an error that something had become corrupted but it fixed it before it finished loading windows, however I left it overnight and came back in the morning and there was no data on the disk (error f:\is not accessible. The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.)
If I goto properties/tools on f: and choose error checking as soon as I press start the prog quits, if I reboot it brings up disk checking on f: and says master file table is corrupt and checkdisk will not run.

Is it knackered or is there a way to fix this MFT & will I be able to get my data back, is the drive broken or will a format fix it, it seems really strange to me to have two drives (both newish, f:6 months old max c:&d: drive 3 months old) mess up at the same time, what could cause this? could it be a faulty ide cable, could a poor psu cause it or is it just coincendence?

I can run the wd error disk on them and both pass, will my c: eventually pack up as its annoying as it is as I cant return it if theres no error code.

[profdlp]

Try booting off the Windows XP CD, and press 'R' for the recovery console.

Follow prompts until you get to the command line (after logging in).

Now type "fixboot" to see if it will repair the boot sector, most of the time that will fix the problem you are having.

If that does not help, try running "chkdsk /fix" from the recovery console.

Is your anti-virus stuff up-to-date?

[JAZ]

Hi prof, I ran an updated virus scan (AVG free) last night and it passed ok, booted with the xp cd and tried to run those progs you said.
Fixboot didnt work, it said "specified disk is not valid or theres no disk in drive" so I tried the chkdsk /fix and it said /fix was an invalid parameter so I tried chkdisk /? and it said the only parameters I could use was /p or /r neither of which did anything I think due to the error above.
Is there any progs I can use in windows to try and recover the MFT? or do you have any other ideas please.

Im running a program called getdataback ntfs on it at the moment so I hope it will sort it out but it has an time remaining of 8 hours, but I'll post back if it works or not allthough its a shareware prog so it will prob finish and say it could fix it but I'll have to pay :grumble:

[profdlp]

See if anything here (http://www.ntfs.com/partition-recovery-concepts.htm) is helpful.

I'll keep looking - this would be good knowledge for anyone to have.

[JAZ]

Thanks prof, I had another bash at the repair console and tried writing new fixmbr & fixboot etc but the best I could get was an error "the volume contains one or more unrecoverable problems".
The results I got from the getdataback ntfs program were a bit disappointing as nearly all the large files were un-recoverable and it looks like the files that have been saved I have archived most of anyway, but as I cant afford the cost of a licence for the program it don’t matter too much really anyway.
I think I'm just going to give up on it and format it as its looking like the easiest thing to do as it seems its messed up really bad.
I will read that link you put up but I had a good look the other day at a few sites with no luck, and I’ll hold off a day or two before I format it incase something turns up.
Cheers again

[profdlp]

You don't have a copy of Norton Utilities or System Works laying around, do you? I've had good luck booting from the Norton CD and running Disk Doctor (I believe it's ndd.exe - you might have to browse the disc to find it.)

Have it look for a partition and try and fix it.