Assistance with lost data on Ext. HD

Your help/suggestions/input etc. would be appreciated:

I recently upgraded to a larger, better external hard-drive. I loaded about 200 gigs onto it of music, video, and pics. About 1 day later (roughly 24 hours after I bought the drive), I came home and there was a windows error message on my screen that read: Windows waws unable to save all the data for the file E:\$Mft. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.

So I clicked to explore the drive, and sure enough it was empty! The problem is that my computer is working fine, and my drive won't stop "spinning" even though it's NOT in use. I think I must have done something I wasn't supposed to. I searched through the Western Digital (the maker of the drive) support website, and googled this issue. The only logical explanation is that I messed with the drive while it was doing the 'automatic backup'. Unfortunately, none of the information was backed up (I had only owned the drive for a day!). If the data truly is lost I researched "data recovery" sites which cost hundreds of dollars... I also found downloadable "do it yourself" data recovery software called SpinRite 6 for pretty cheap. Can someone confirm what the issue is, and possibly provide some solutions? Thank you.

 

If it was a new drive, it's possible that it was just defective. (I've been going through 3 of those in the last month. It happens)

So, the obvious question, what happened to the old drive? Don't you still have the data on that?

Otherwise, not that much you can do. Run chkdsk and various data recovery tools. (Can even send the disk to a company that specializes in this, but that gets really pricey)

 

Right. I'm trying to avoid sending it away. I deleted the data from the old drive... so that's gone. What is "chkdsk" and how do I perform that? There is "data recovery" software called SpinRite 6 that is considerably cheaper than sending it out. Do you know about this enough to recommend or not recommend it? Thanks.

 

I should also mention that I am afraid to unplug the drive. It is constantly "in use" (spinning light), and won't stop spinning. If I just unplug it will I damage it even more?!

 

chkdsk is a program that comes with windows. You can run it from the command prompt (cmd.exe) or from the start menu's 'run' option. (just type 'chkdsk c: /f' (replace c: with whatever drive letter your external drive is)

About data recovery tools, the best advice I can give is *don't* overwrite anything. Don't delete files or create files or move files or anything else. If you do that, it becomes *much* harder to recover any useful data.
And most likely, if it works, it will only give you some of your data back.

 

If the data on there is really important, your best bet is to send it in to a professional. Otherwise, there's not much hope from recovery software

 

The data isn't extremely critical... but I wouldn't mind having it back of course. I don't think it's worth spending hundreds of dollars on. What's the difference using the software? It just isn't as reliable?

 

Download and run the trial version of RecoverMyFiles. You can run it for free (I'd recommend using the "Full Format Recovery") and see what files it can get back, and then you purchase the license to actually recover the files. It is the cheapest utility out there that I could find, but it did its job extremely well for me.

It recovered several GB of data for me when I accidentally reformatted, but yes DO NOT USE THE DRIVE TO WRITE ANY FILES UNTIL THIS UTILITY IS DONE RECOVERING EVERYTHING. The scan might take up to a day depending on the speed of the drive, but it is worth it for valuable data. I had a 100% recovery rate because I didn't use the drive after I realized what I did.

 

That's not good. If the MFT was never saved, I don't see how the data can be retrieved. Feel free to try out the suggestions above but don't get your hopes up. I would not send it to the data retrieval experts, as I do not feel they would be able to retrieve your information and charge you anyway for their services.

 

RecoverMyFiles ignores the MFT when it does a full format recovery...

 

News to me. How does that work?