MFT, the acronym stands for Master File Table. MFT stores information about every file and directory in an NTFS file system or volume. Windows file system reserves first 16 records of MFT, which is explicitly known as ‘meta data’, the area to store special information about files. The design of MFT increases the efficiency of the file system in terms of faster accessing of files but it is more important with respect to the functioning of the whole process. Hence, any damage to MFT results in the inaccessibility of the hard drive and thereby you may require any partition recovery mechanism to recover the inaccessible files.
Now, let us discuss MFT in a bit detail. In general, MFT is more like a relational database table, which stores various attributes of all the files in the drive. In fact, it is more than just a list that stores the used and free clusters, moreover it is the starting point of the storage area and the central management feature of an NTFS volume.
The first record of the MFT stores information about the the MFT itself, followed by the mirror record of MFT. Once, the first MFT record gets corrupt, file system reads second record that is of the MFT mirror to get the information. These first 2 records are exactly the same. There is a third entry of MFT, that is the log file, which is used for file recovery purposes. The records, 16th onwards, stores the information about every file and folder on the drive partition.
From the number of entries of the MFT and the way data is accessed taking information from MFT tells us about the importance of it. Therefore, any type of damage to the MFT due to any reason has a sharp impact on the accessibility of the data in the drive. MFT damage may result in the inaccessibility of the hard drive and though it is equally important to rectify the damaged MFT it is more important to recover the data first. For the recovery, you need any partition recovery software.
Partition recovery is the process of retrieving your lost data after extracting the logical partitions from the physical hard drive. These partition recovery software can recover your valuable data from any instances of data loss such as: MFT corruption, file system damage, virus infection, operating system malfunction, deletion or formatting of hard drive/partition. Apart from their efficient recovery techniques, their interactive interface is an added plus for non-technical users.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is one of the powerful partition recovery softwares in the recent market which is capable of recovering all your FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5 and VFAT file system partitions. This partition recovery utility has an added feature is that it comes with a boot CD, that can boot Windows OS on an non-booting Windows system. It’s compatibility to 185 mostly used file formats and support to Microsoft Windows Vista, 2003, XP and 2000 makes it a really worthy choice.