New Acer deleted files without prior warning on a external hard drive

gjchester

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

gjchester - that makes sense. I'll buy another. No, I'll buy two. that way when I muck it up again I have a back up.


It's speeded up a lot now. Down to a respectable 9rs 30.

It may be done by now, but the estimated time is usually based on the last few units of work done.


When it hits bad blocks and tried so the estimate shoots up then as it clear the bad blocks it will go down however it looks the drive may be fault.


You don't need to throw it away, a full format should mark the faulty blocks as so, however don't use it for anything critical, so maybe just use it for moving data from one PC to another where a copy stays on one PC until you know its moved OK.

sidefx

Syman wrote: »

Would just like to chip in about Tavernman's posts. you Sir, are a top bloke.

no panic, no judgemental "you should have backed up" rubbish. Just calm, easy to understand and follow instruction.

Can I just 'chip in' to agree that Taverman is indeed a 'top bloke'.

Cottage_Economy

gjchester wrote: »

It may be done by now, but the estimated time is usually based on the last few units of work done.


When it hits bad blocks and tried so the estimate shoots up then as it clear the bad blocks it will go down however it looks the drive may be fault.


You don't need to throw it away, a full format should mark the faulty blocks as so, however don't use it for anything critical, so maybe just use it for moving data from one PC to another where a copy stays on one PC until you know its moved OK.

Ok, will format it and use for non-critical data. Thank you.

sidefx wrote: »

Can I just 'chip in' to agree that Taverman is indeed a 'top bloke'.

You'll get no argument from me there. Great bloke.


Thank you to everyone on this thread. I now have a complete recovery of all of my files and just have to sort through it all and get it into some semblance of order.


In addition I have to work out what to do with this trackpad. It is an utter nightmare. I cannot use it effectively to do anything. Even surfing is impossible on it. Part of the problem I think is its size. It's huge with the keyboard above it so if the skin on part of my hard lightly touches it by accident off we go on a magical mystery tour.


EDITED TO ADD: it appears there is nothing on the mouse settings in control panel to adjust the sensitivity. From a look on the forum in the Acer community it appears that Acer touchpads are so sensitive they are known to function even when you don't touch them - if you, say, don't keep you fingers high enough away from it and hover over it. Apparently I may have to download a synaptic driver to disable it completely. Ridiculous.

grumpycrab

Yes, disable the trackpad (<Fn> F7 disables/enables the touchpad possibly?) and get a mouse.

spud17

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

How long did i take?

At the moment, it's telling me it will still take 128hrs to complete....it's still finding the odd file but barely any .doc or .xls files.

It was a small (20GB) drive from an XP pc, but even then it took around 20hrs.

As stated elsewhere, it could be struggling to read a particular section, then again if it gets through that, it may fly to the end.

tavernman

Hi, I was out most of yesterday, and this morning but how did you get on with the recovery? I hope you managed to get a good proportion of your data back.
I would suggest you buy a memory stick to create the "Windows 8 recovery" which caused this little hiccup to happen. Also I would agree with gjchester, the disk will probably be fine, the "slowness" could be down to trying tho make sense of fragments of files it was trying to use, or indeed due to bad blocks, but I think it would give you error messages if that happened.

tavernman

Just a word for the folks who were kind enough to sing my praises, sadly I feel the thanks should be directed at Christophe GRENIER of cgsecurity.org
It is his program and he makes it freely available, I have used it many times to help friends to recover their data so I would vote him a :beer: and thanks.

Cottage_Economy

grumpycrab wrote: »

Yes, disable the trackpad (<Fn> F7 disables/enables the touchpad possibly?) and get a mouse.

Suuuuppppeeerrrbbb!!!!!!!! Thank you! That worked.

tavernman wrote: »

Hi, I was out most of yesterday, and this morning but how did you get on with the recovery? I hope you managed to get a good proportion of your data back.
I would suggest you buy a memory stick to create the "Windows 8 recovery" which caused this little hiccup to happen. Also I would agree with gjchester, the disk will probably be fine, the "slowness" could be down to trying tho make sense of fragments of files it was trying to use, or indeed due to bad blocks, but I think it would give you error messages if that happened.

Hi Taverman, it worked very well. I believe I have got back most if not all of the files. Just the task of sorting them out. As the file creation dates are still in the properties it shouldn't take too long.

tavernman wrote: »

Just a word for the folks who were kind enough to sing my praises, sadly I feel the thanks should be directed at Christophe GRENIER of cgsecurity.org
It is his program and he makes it freely available, I have used it many times to help friends to recover their data so I would vote him a :beer: and thanks.

Will go across and donate now. Thanks tavernman.

tavernman

You're welcome, glad the result seems good,

Seven years of memories gone. I'm in floods.

Hope your insurance premiums don't go up too much:cool:

spud17

tavernman wrote: »

Just a word for the folks who were kind enough to sing my praises, sadly I feel the thanks should be directed at Christophe GRENIER of cgsecurity.org
It is his program and he makes it freely available, I have used it many times to help friends to recover their data so I would vote him a :beer: and thanks.

It's a great program.
If you're a bit more advanced, it can also be used to recover/rebuild partition tables.
The one time I used it in this manner, all the data reappeared, and the disk lasted long enough for me to recover all the data.