[rockofullr]

My system went to standby and powered down while saving files to my External HDD. Now I am getting an error reading:

"the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

Tried Disk Manager and the HDD is not showing up as NTFS or RAW (it's supposed to be NTFS I think?).

Tried chkdsk got the following, "The type of the file system is NTFS. Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted."

How screwed am I?

 

[eaterofdog]

Sounds pretty bad, you wrote garbage into the directories. You need a good disk repair program.

 

[Pesqueeb]

Pretty Screwed.

 

[ire]

have you tried reformatting from the command line? I had a similar issue with a USB stick.

 

[rockofullr]

Sounds pretty bad, you wrote garbage into the directories. You need a good disk repair program.

Any suggestions?

 

[eaterofdog]

I cannot recommend a product as I don't use windows much. Check PC forums or google for infos.

Sounds like you lost the directory, which means the files are still sitting there, but the computer has no idea where anything is. What you need is something that will scan the whole drive and copy found files to another drive. You don't want to format or use anything that "fixes" the drive until you get a good handle on the problem. Anything written to the drive will be overwriting your files.

 

[H8R]

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[rockofullr]

I cannot recommend a product as I don't use windows much. Check PC forums or google for infos.

Sounds like you lost the directory, which means the files are still sitting there, but the computer has no idea where anything is. What you need is something that will scan the whole drive and copy found files to another drive. You don't want to format or use anything that "fixes" the drive until you get a good handle on the problem. Anything written to the drive will be overwriting your files.

This is really gonna suck. The HDD has more storage space than my computer, tons of overflow stuff from work. Guess this is why everything needs to be backed up in the future.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Thanks hopefully something in there can help. I already tried to repair the partition with TestDisk but that didn't get me anywhere.

 

[H8R]

Make a Linux live CD, boot into it, see if the system can mount the drive and if files are there you can copy them to another drive.


Future:

What I do for backups is I have a master backup drive that is as big as the main drive in the desktop plus the other external drive.

So the desktop drive is 1TB
My external photo/video drive is 2TB (Adobe Lightroom catalogs everything here)
My OTHER external drive is 3TB and it does continuous backup of the other 2 drives.

I am buying one additional 3TB soon to make off-site incremental copies of the 3TB backup drive. This will be stored at my studio and brought home a couple times a month to archive everything.

 

[Whoops]

ok - I've just had a failure on my ex HDD - computer couldn't see drive at all. After hours combing various nerdy forums I gave up trying to fix it and smashed it with a hammer.




Then I took the HDD itself out of the plastic case, opened up my desktop, plugged it into a spare SATA port using the DVD drive's cable and - presto chango - instant complete access to all files/folders.



Seems it was the little control pcb in the ex HDD case that had shat itself somehow.



YMMV of course.

 

[rockofullr]

Make a Linux live CD, boot into it, see if the system can mount the drive and if files are there you can copy them to another drive.

Will that help if the directory/filesystem is corrupt? Linux still uses the same Master File Table to locate and access data right?

Future:

What I do for backups is I have a master backup drive that is as big as the main drive in the desktop plus the other external drive.

So the desktop drive is 1TB
My external photo/video drive is 2TB (Adobe Lightroom catalogs everything here)
My OTHER external drive is 3TB and it does continuous backup of the other 2 drives.

I am buying one additional 3TB soon to make off-site incremental copies of the 3TB backup drive. This will be stored at my studio and brought home a couple times a month to archive everything.

In a perfect world

ok - I've just had a failure on my ex HDD - computer couldn't see drive at all. After hours combing various nerdy forums I gave up trying to fix it and smashed it with a hammer.

Then I took the HDD itself out of the plastic case, opened up my desktop, plugged it into a spare SATA port using the DVD drive's cable and - presto chango - instant complete access to all files/folders.

Seems it was the little control pcb in the ex HDD case that had shat itself somehow.

YMMV of course.

The problem with this HDD is not physical. I can still access data in another partition on the device.

 

[rockofullr]

So it looks like I can recover my files with "Recover My Files" (tried the demo and it was able to find my files). The only issue is that it costs $70 before you can actually move the files to a safe location. Anyone know of a free program which can accomplish the same task?

Most of the free "File Recovery" programs I have come across are for deleted files.

 

[ultraNoob]

try it now

 

[rockofullr]

try it now

Sounds good!

Successfully recovering files using "PhotoRec". Should be finished in 18hrs FML. Then I have to sort through the files and figure out what they are because most of them lost the file names! Everything should be back to normal in about a month lol

 

[eaterofdog]

Most of the free "File Recovery" programs I have come across are for deleted files.

FYI "deleted" files are pretty much what you have now. They have just been removed from the directory but still reside on the disk till overwritten.

 

[ultraNoob]

yikes... a month?

I had an ext hdd fail on me a few years ago. thankfully it only had boring surveillance footage. Had there been any GOOD surveillance on it, I woulda been pissed

 

[rockofullr]

FYI "deleted" files are pretty much what you have now. They have just been removed from the directory but still reside on the disk till overwritten.

Interesting... thanks for the tip!

I'm going to try to recover the NTFS boot sector and MTF then I'm just gonna have to recover the files the hard way.

yikes... a month?

I dunno...

At this point I don't even have enough storage space to get this mess copied to another location. Then who know how long it will take to figure out what all these files are.

 

[SkaredShtles]

<snip> Guess this is why everything needs to be backed up in the future.

Sorry about having a laugh at your expense...

 

[jimmydean]

This is really gonna suck. The HDD has more storage space than my computer, tons of porn. Guess this is why everything needs to be backed up in the future.

Yes, backups are good to do and stuff.

 

[bean]

I just had a failed drive for the first time recently. I'm pretty methodical about backups so recovery was fairly trivial. I had a new drive over nighted, then one robocopy later I was back in business.

 

[rockofullr]

Sorry about having a laugh at your expense...

Yes, backups are good to do and stuff.

Seriously. I had no Idea how easy it is to screw up an external HDD until today.

Lucky none of my current work is on there, just old stuff I wanted to keep around.

 

[SkaredShtles]

<snip>
Seriously. I had no Idea how easy it is to screw up an external HDD until today.[/quote]
You apparently don't pay much attention around here. :D

[quote]Lucky none of my current work is on there, just old stuff I wanted to keep around.[/quote]
Yeah... backups are good and stuff. :rofl:

 

[Austin Bike]

I recommend multiple layers of backup. all of my client PCs back up to a server at home. Then the server is backed up to a NAS. The NAS has removable drives, so I alternate between drives, taking one to work with me. So I have online backup in real time on the server. 3-5 day old data on the NAS and week old data in my desk drawer at work. I have not lost a single file in 20 years. And the fact that I have 350GB of music and 150GB of digital pictures, recreating things could be a pain.