Number of sectors in Boot sector and Backup boot sector is not the same

[ananas]

Hello. Recently my external hard drive got broken and I've been trying to solve the problem for a week now. The problem is that the drive doesn't boot and file system is shown as RAW. I found the boot sector of my disk and ZAR says it's valid (NTFS). But when i tried to find the Backup boot sector (LBABackup = Base + RelativeSectors + Size - 1) the number i got was higher then the highest number ZAR allowed me to type in ctrl + g. So I tried to go to the highest adress possible and then I've tried previous sector. And surprisingly I found the backup NTFS boot sector. It also seems valid, the only difference is in Number of sectors. Boot sector says 976784067 and backup boot sector says 976773104. Now I'm wondering, if it's somehow possible to change the number of sectors in boot sector or if there is some other solution, please help me.

Thank you.

[ananas]

I tried Diskprobe and it says that the total sectors number is 976768065, which is even lower than the two numbers in boot sectors ...

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Check where the MFT and MFT Mirror records in boot sector point to, using ZAR disk viewer.

if yes, use Disk Probe to copy backup boot sector over the primary one, see if this works.

[ananas]

Originally Posted by Alexey V. Gubin

Check where the MFT and MFT Mirror records in boot sector point to, using ZAR disk viewer.

if yes, use Disk Probe to copy backup boot sector over the primary one, see if this works.

MFT is at 786432 and the mirror one on 2. I tried to copy backup boot sector over the primary one and it didn't help, it only got worse. I suppose that the writing head has to be somehow damaged, because the primary boot sector is now not readable (cyclic redunancy check). Luckily MFT stays readable (the mirror one doesn't) and also backup boot sector. I also have backup of HEX code of both boot sectors and primary MFT. Is it possible to place the boot sector somewhere else and tell the drive to boot from there? Or is it at least possible to get the data from drive, when i got the MFT?

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Make an image of the drive, then use something like OSF Mount to work with the image.