Hardrive issues

For some reason, when I connect my external hardrive to my laptop, Its reading as 15gb/250gb as it should but no files are viable. they all disappeared

what happened? I didn't get a chance to try it on any other computers yet though.

 

Try it again on a different port? Sometimes windows gets funny with external HDD the first time I plug them in...

 

start > search "computer management" > disk management

make sure the drive is active and is assigned a mount letter. I had an issue sort of similar where my mp3 player would keep stealing the H: volume mount and my comp would forget where my 1TB external was

If that doesn't work, make sure you can see hidden folders in the folders options

 

it didin't work it already had a drive letter.

Here is what I get on partition manager. Perhaps I can do something from here? They look like ddl files but look at the file size. 350mb. Those should be some of my 720p videos.



edit - currently scanning disk for errors. Maybe that would work...

edit - nvm, disk check finished in a second probably didn't scan anything.

edit - :cry:

edit - the files still work. I dragged one of the files into kmplayer (even though they look like dlls) and it plays the video. Some of them anyway... not sure. all my files were put into a found.000 folder. each file is labeled recovered file fragments. Is there anyway to restore them back?

 

It almost sounds like the drive has been hidden by another OS or program - ie, I have a USB key with a live ubuntu install, which is invisible under windows. I'm not even sure how to unhide them in windows, but at least that might point you in the right direction. I THINK the attribs you are looking for are -s -h....

 

honestly, I have no idea what you are talking about.... I could drag each vid over one by one and rename them and put .mkv or .avi. etc on them but that would take forever.

I wonder why this happened...

 

Was it a FAT32 volume? Sounds like it got corrupted, can happen for any number of reasons (unsafe removal, writing to the disk and removing power, etc). There are file recovery programs that might be able to reassemble the FAT table in some cases, but none that I know of that are free and have easy interfaces. You can use testdisk, but it's not at all user friendly, you'd need to read up on how to use it.

TestDisk - CGSecurity

 

thanks for the link. Yea, its fat322.

I'll try it anyway, I really really need this thing to work. (says a prayer). If it works, then Ima back this thing up asap.

edit - Ok, I'm using testdisk and it looks like this may save all my files. currently searching my drive. However, my file names are screwed. they are all reading as 7xxxx or 6xxx or whatever which really sucks..... nohing I can do about that though.

 

I have had this happen to me in the past, and I ended up reformatting the drive , the file you saw the found.000 folder is where the recovery program put the files after a recovery. Now is you drive bad, I do not know . It could be that it is incompatible with your system , but I do not know how to tell you to check for this. You might read and do a search on google on your type of drive to see if anyone else has had this issue come up. There may be an easy fix or firmware update for your drive to fix this.

 

thanks for your reply. To make sure, I tested this on xp, and windows 7 using 3 different computers and same issue. I'm sure formatting will fix it but I just would like to know why it happened.

guess I'll just have to be more careful with it as who knows, my bro or parents or someone could of did something without me knowing.....

So, I guess there is 100% no way for me to restore the file names huh? What if I had a movie or something in parts (pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, etc). Would there be some shortcut to finding them fast from the thousand of files I have on here? I guess not huh.....

 

Unless you have a reason to be using FAT32, use NTFS if you reformat it. It's much less susceptible to corruption like this.

 

I have 2 drives 500GB & 2TB both NTFS and they work perfectly..and i had one other and it was a fat32 drive and it messed up and i lost 140 GB worth of stuff and the main problem was i keept unpluging it from the pc without using the safely remove hardware thing on the task bar...i had to format it and to my surprise it was permanently messed up...it wouldn't work at all i would put files on it and they would mess up right when i put them on it.....

Ok well the pic you gave..all the files have the .CHK extension

.CHK Info >>The CHK file type is primarily associated with 'CHKDSK/SCANDISK Output'. File fragments cleaned from the disk. When you run the DOS or Windows disk checking programs they can find errors and may write these out as file fragments in .CHK files. Often these can be deleted as the information is elsewhere on your hard disk. Sometimes, however, you need to recover information from a .CHK file (or files). Use UnCHK and/or FileCHK to help you do this.

i found this at >> File Extension .CHK Details



Here is some diffrent info about that extension>> Well, any time a program or Windows crashes, any files that were open are not closed properly. Part of closing is writing all the file location information in all the right places. Without this info, Windows can't find all the parts of the file. When SCANDISK or CHKDISK is run, all the parts are identified as "lost file fragments" and converted (if you want) into CHK files. Face it. Stuff crashes all the time. If you only run SCANDISK once a month, you get a month's worth of old crash junk. If you were working on (and lost) something important just before a crash, you might want to try to recover any data from any CHK files that exist. On the other hand, if you aren't in a state of panic over lost data, just delete any CHK files. A handy tip: Keep your disk defragmented. That way if you ever do lose it all, the lost file fragments will be more likely to be complete files.

i got this info at >> http://www.ericphelps.com/uncheck/


LOOK AT THIS SITE IT LOOKS LIKE IT MIGHT HELP YOU ^^^


i saw this on anime breaker so i thought i would help....i hope i did


if you need me to search for something or if i come up with anything i will tell

 

DAMN MAN, thx. I'll look into this. And here I was making fun of you in the welcome thread

 

Srry about all that.....if it was me i probably would of not read all that....lol (Lazy)



Good luck


please tell if it worked