You’d be darned unlucky to have a logical problem take out both MFT’s. The latter can happen due to faulty RAM or the power suddenly going out. The last thing you need to determine is whether the drive failed because of a physical fault, or whether it was just a logical/file system fault. It’s probably no better or worse than anything else, but I’m familiar with it and have never had issues. I generally use EayRecovery to do raw recoveries. When you do this many of the recovered files will be corrupt, and the ones that are ok will lose their metadata (file name, folder etc). “hey, this looks like a gif file”, “this could be a Word document”). You’ll need to do a raw recovery (where the MFT is ignored and the recovery software runs through every sector of the drive looking for file signatures that it recognises (ie. * If it doesn’t boot, you will have to run recovery software over the old drive. This is very likely to fail, but once or twice I’ve had a failed drive clone to a new one then be bootable/accessible.

* Try cloning from your existing drive to the new one. Without it, your drives contents are just a bunch of 0’s and 1’s – the MFT is needed to make sense of them. The MFT is the list of all the files on the partition. I don’t see that you have any more options.

Testdisk repair mft