Hard drive corrupt? About to lose files?

Olinda99

make sure under 'view' you untick 'hide protected operating system files' (or similar)

JustAnotherSaver

Olinda99 said:

make sure under 'view' you untick 'hide protected operating system files' (or similar)

Well it does show something, although when it says in computer 4.41TB free of 5.45TB, I never expected it to be all my missing files.

$RECYCLE.BIN  folder

found.000  folder

System Volume Information  folder.

First 2 are totally empty

System Volume has various files in, nothing useful to me.

JustAnotherSaver

Ok not good news.

Been on the remote help with EaseUS.

Basically if I hadn't ran chkdsk, they say that it's likely I would've been able to recover absolutely everything.

Now chkdsk has been ran that's not the case they say.

And it seems to now be a case of run the program and see what, if anything, it'll recover.

So chkdsk wasn't the answer

Olinda99

I suspect running chkdsk wasn't the problem - running chkdsk and pressing restart half way through the process was.

JustAnotherSaver

I can only tell you what they said & I gave them the full picture.

Neil_Jones

CHKDSK does not in itself delete files. 

When it says its "deleting index entry" or things like that, those are not files.  They are part of (in layman's terms) part of a database on the drive that WIndows uses to find the files.  A part of that is what was corrupt, and that is what results in the "found.000" folders you see - because Windows has no way of knowing where they were before, so the referenced files gets plonked in there.

The situation with the recycle bin is usually because that is a special folder in Windows, so if that gets corrupt for whatever reason, CHKDSK will try to fix it, which gives the impression that it's full of files. There isn't a "limit" as such to how much the bin can hold so in theory it can be as much as there is free space available (it used to be 10% of the drive by default but in an era of terabyte drives that's ridiculous so it's can be as low as 1%).  And by the way, in Windows each drive has its own Recycle Bin - the one on Drive C is only for that drive.  If you have an external Drive D that will have its own recycle bin.

The initial "RAW" issue was caused by your stopping CHKDSK halfway through, as that leaves it in a hybrid/"dirty" state.

JustAnotherSaver

@Neil_Jones thanks for the explanation. Makes a bit more sense to me now.

What's done is done now but at the time when I just saw "deleting.............[everything!]" I panicked & wanted to know what should be done.

I guess I'll never know but I do wonder what caused this issue. Why I couldn't access the drive, why it needed chkdsk running at all. I know things can just go wrong at no notice but it had been running fine for a long time. Only now do I start disconnecting sata & power cables as I start setting the other SSD up for moving to Windows 10 and voila, coincidentally things then start going bad.

So naturally I just wonder if there's something about this connecting & disconnecting cables, having the drives in Win10, Win7, back to Win10 that triggered something. Not that it makes a difference now, I just wonder.

I actually have Stellar Data Recovery running, not EaseUS. I did a bit more searching and it seemed to be a better fit. Whether it is or not, I don't know.

I'm not particularly bothered about the movie rips. Well I am because they took time. Naturally I want everything back. If i had to select to lose something then it'd be that. I just hope this program rescues my most important images & music. The images can't ever be replaced & a lot of the music is rare & no longer available to access.

Went to bed & the program had 9 hours to scan.

Woke up and it'd been scanning for 7 hours but now has 17 hours left to scan.

JustAnotherSaver

To touch back on to what the EaseUS guy said to me - running chkdsk has caused me a problem (I appreciate you saying stopping it caused the RAW state - this guy just said simply running it was a bad idea).

So because of that, he said I wont get everything back. Without it I would've (very likely).

So out of curiosity - say I was some master criminal & the top level took me in & wanted to go over my hard drive to see what's on there.

EaseUS guy said I wont get everything back.

Would these top level computer guys with the best software in the world be able to get everything back?

Now before you choke on your morning coffee, no I'm not realistically thinking of getting in touch with these kinds of people. I'm just simply curious about the situation - is it a case that Joe Bloggs on the street with what's available to the consumer can only hope to get back 10% of the lost content.

But top level investigators have access to superior software & knowledge and would be able to get back 90%, 100%.

Just curiosity, nothing else.

Ozzig

There are lots of very legitimate data recovery companies out there, that will try more advanced recovery software or take the drive apart and read all the 1s and 0s on each platter then use that to reassemble as much as they can.

It doesn't help you now, but I try and stick to  3-2-1 

3 copies of everything I don't want to lose, 2 of them at home on different devices and 1copy somewhere else. (cloud/relatives' house etc)

JustAnotherSaver

Ozzig said:

3 copies of everything I don't want to lose, 2 of them at home on different devices and 1copy somewhere else. (cloud/relatives' house etc)

That's what this 8TB drive I bought this week was all about - starting to get that put in action.

The timing of it all is just incredibly frustrating & it's totally my own fault.

Had this all just happened a few days later, I'd have had everything backed up & it wouldn't be an issue. I could chuck the drive in the bin & say no big deal.

I had actually made a backup of the drive, BUT, it is really quite old. It's at least 1 year old. Maybe 2. Then to make matters worse (yes trust me, just when you thought it couldn't...) I had to remove that (delete the backup) off the drive to make space for a fresh backup of another drive - because I simply didn't have the available space on drives. My thought process at the time (the other day) was that this backup (of the problem drive) is so old & this brand new hard drive will be here in a few days time & I'll just back it up fresh then but in the meantime I'll get a fresh backup of this (other) drive.

Only I could balls up on this scale It's just typical.

As said earlier in this, I was in discussion with another guy elsewhere about backups. I'm now not totally against cloud backups. He did touch on the difference between archives & backups. Not quite sure I 'get it' but his pricing on his 'archive' was a smidge over $1 per month. Can't really grumble at that. $12 per year, even if that converts to a bit more in £GBP - I spend more than that on my half of a takeaway order.