Long story below, sorry for the trouble. start of frustrating experience I'm an ubuntu user and have an old ntfs external portable 4TB hdd. I usually format all my portable disks to ext4 to not rely on ntfs and microsoft product. This drive was filled to capacity before i shifted to linux completely. Recently In ubuntu i ran gparted on this drive and it showed thousands of errors and told me to run scandisk with /f option. The gparted error message is about a few thousand clusters referenced multiple times. I asked my neighbor to use his windows pc, but apparently he only has XP installed. I think XP has problem with usb3 devices? or I read somewhere not to use XP for scanning such errors. I have just 4GB ram and a low end celeron processor NUC. (important). So i wanted something that could run through virtual box on my low end system. So in search of running check disk or scan disk i searched the net and even MS site hoping for some free stuff. I found a winPE iso called medicat usb on some gaming forum. I think it was my mistake thinking it was a portable windows installation. In virtualbox it wouldn't run at all. Just gave error to check boot disk or device and restart. So I tried downloading windows 10 x64 1906? or what the latest version of it was and tried running it in virtual disk. No dice. After a hour and half of installation and restarting, it kept getting stuck on some OOOBE error one after another. Searching the Oracle forums I saw that versions of windows installer after 140x have this problem in virtual box. Since I couldn't find that version for download on Microsoft or other sites, I downloaded windows 8 32 bit sp3 since the 64 bit version was too resource heavy for my pc. Windows 8 just wont let me install without any product key. Tried all the keys from here. Got fed up. So I gave up installing windows 8. Microsoft sure goes a long way to make their software unusable for testing purposes. I don't understand why they don't have a stand alone disk scanning software for free that can run from a usb pen drive. People say its easy to work on windows, but see what happens if you're outside that ecosystem ;( end of frustrating experience My last option is a very expensive one. Copy all the data off the 4TB hdd to a new 4TB ext4 formatted hdd and be rid of these headaches all together. So can anyone help me with some standalone ntfs disk scanning utility which does not require windows to be installed?
First of all, start with giving info about this HDD, give the exact information about the HDD. Then information on whether this disk has the necessary data to store and if so how much. Finally, your prior information is not credible, and if this disk really has so many problems and errors, it is very unlikely that it will be recoverable. However, if you still think you want to try, you have to take into account that it will take a very-very long time and most likely You will lost all data. Even if somebody trying to give you "very wise" advice on how to save everything, take it as you want, but most likely it is not possible to realize. The easiest way to do something, is to put this HDD on any decent computer and have it repaired. You can boot pc from any boot disk and you do not need to install anything on your computer. You can probably get some positive results if you really happens, that you can fix bad sectors and then do full formatting, not Quick formatting. But my personal opinion is that it's just a waste of time. But again - I personally don't think your HDD is as damaged as you claim. But that's just my opinion.
Solved. Took just few minutes in windows 8 to check for errors and repair the drive. Just like @kaljukass said, no bad sectors on disk. Thanks man. Code: 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 has made corrections to the file system. No further action is required. 3815412 MB total disk space. 3762716 MB in 13521 files. 7264 KB in 1099 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 201079 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 53752436 KB available on disk. 4096 bytes in each allocation unit. 976745727 total allocation units on disk. 13438109 allocation units available on disk.