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Chkdsk just deleted 91GB of data

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LiuKangBakinPie

LiuKangBakinPie

Diamond Member
Restarted my pc and chkdsk decided to run. It deleted 91gb of my data. How do I get it back? Most of it is my music which I need as I do DJ'ing!

I know there was nothing wrong with the drive cause some of my movies is a chk folder but perfectly fine


Necro thread.
Poster has not been active since Aug 2012
EK
 
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Chkdsk accidentally 91GB of your data?!

Maybe try Piriform's Recuva: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Or if this is a version of Windows with Shadow Copy, you could try using Previous Versions to recover them. This is a capability of Win7 Pro/Ultimate and Vista Business/Ultimate.

To use Previous Versions, open My Computer and browse to their former location from the C:\ drive (or whatever drive), then right-click in the folder where they were, choose Properties from the right-click menu, and hit the Previous Versions tab. Note that you cannot do this from the Libraries view, it must be the Windows Explorer view, so start from My Computer rather than, say, Start > Music.
 
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Previous Versions is one of the biggest pros in 7. Have to admit that.

-BUT-

If the data hasn't been overwritten, you are likely to stay in the DJ business.

What to use?

Good call. It's been a while since I had to restore deleted data. I remember using Recuva and it wasn't good.

Check PM.
 
This is one reason why never use Chkdsk with the auto repair option enabled.
However, the issue would seem to be .... why were the data deleted? What did Chkdsk tell you when it completed? If data disappears it usually is because files are damaged and the Chkdsk utility attempts to separate the damaged files out (and save the remnants as Filennnn.chk):

"If you press Y, Windows saves each lost chain in the root directory as a file with a name in the format Filennnn.chk. When chkdsk finishes, you can check these files to see if they contain any data you need. If you press N, Windows fixes the disk, but it does not save the contents of the lost allocation units."

In the final analysis, you need to have the disk directory and file structures reporting aligned with the sector 0 allocation table (or vice versa).
 
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Well, 91gb worth of data... taken out by a power outage is really strange. Unless some sort of a gremlin foul play ;-p
 
whoops...

had this happen before w\ some damaged files... bam.. chkdsk erased EVERYTHING. had to do a teduis reload from tape.
 
When this happened to me, it was because the hard drive had developed a flurry of bad sectors. Some of these, just happened to contain several directories containing a bunch of valuable files.

Windows had obviously noted this, because the next time I restarted, chkdsk started, and tried to repair the damage, but as the directory entries for all these files had been corrupted and lost, the files appeared to have been "deleted".

NTFS is very resilient to data corruption due to unclean shutdowns, etc. Normally, it requires something to have actually corrupted critical data (e.g. overclocking, RAM malfucntion, or hard drive bad sectors) before it fails and starts losing data.
 
Mark R said:
NTFS is very resilient to data corruption due to unclean shutdowns, etc. Normally, it requires something to have actually corrupted critical data (e.g. overclocking, RAM malfucntion, or hard drive bad sectors) before it fails and starts losing data.
Click to expand...
Yeah, remember how many times Scandisk would start because of a bad shutdown in Win9x?

Those were the days, haha.
 
Magic Carpet said:
Yeah, remember how many times Scandisk would start because of a bad shutdown in Win9x?

Those were the days, haha.
Click to expand...

Actually, FAT has very high resilience to bad shutdowns. It was a key feature and related to FAT's great simplicity.

The worst thing that would happen after a bad shutdown was that some free space on the drive might be temporarily indisposed. Scandisk would run automatically in order to retrieve that space. You could skip it, and nothing would be corrupted, and the system would run correctly (as long as you still had free space on the drive).

The more complex file structures in NTFS require a more sophisticated protection system - i.e. a journal.
 
Mark R said:
The worst thing that would happen after a bad shutdown was that some free space on the drive might be temporarily indisposed. Scandisk would run automatically in order to retrieve that space. You could skip it, and nothing would be corrupted, and the system would run correctly (as long as you still had free space on the drive).
Click to expand...
That was happening to me a lot, I only had 20gb of space and constantly running out of it. I ended up switching to *nix shortly after.
 
Ok thanks guys. I used uneraser to recover the files. They were deleted nothing wrong with them but the only problem was all my music and albums were in a folder with a number. All the album names gone. I had to recover them on another folder and tried to see which album they were on. Then all my pdfs about 200 of them were chk files. So I had to manually viewed them and named them to a pdf again. Took me a crap load of time still busy trying to sort my music out.

Wonder why windows deleted them. Its the first time chkdsk did that. Deleting perfectly good files.
 
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It didn't, read the posts above, most likely corruption/bad sectors on those directory listings, maybe failed to reallocate those or failed for some reason...then the logic of checkdisk comes in and fixes the corruption leading to your problem.
 
0roo0roo said:
It didn't, read the posts above, most likely corruption/bad sectors on those directory listings, maybe failed to reallocate those or failed for some reason...then the logic of checkdisk comes in and fixes the corruption leading to your problem.
Click to expand...

I just inserted the hdd. When it booted chkdsk ran. I pressed escape but it didnt want to cancel it and went ahead. Then it said deleting Orphan file at and it went on with a huge list. All the data deleted. I mean it wasnt even in a found.00 check folder and such. The directories was deleted. There was nothing wrong with the files. I used the mbr mirror though to recover them so maybe a error with the file table?
 
LiuKangBakinPie said:
I just inserted the hdd. When it booted chkdsk ran. I pressed escape but it didnt want to cancel it and went ahead. Then it said deleting Orphan file at and it went on with a huge list. All the data deleted. I mean it wasnt even in a found.00 check folder and such. The directories was deleted. There was nothing wrong with the files. I used the mbr mirror though to recover them so maybe a error with the file table?
Click to expand...

If chkdsk started as soon as the HD was detected, or during boot - then during the last time the hard drive was in use, windows had detected a serious data corruption (or bad sector problem).

When it does this, it places a marker on the drive, so that the next time the system boots, chkdsk will automatically run and attempt to fix the corruption.

The problem that occurred, was that a major directory listing was corrupted and unrecoverable. Files in that directory, may have been left as "chk" files, but directories, but depending on the level of corruption, subdirectories, or other directories may have been more corrupted, and this would have prevented recovery of subdirectories.
 
Mark R said:
If chkdsk started as soon as the HD was detected, or during boot - then during the last time the hard drive was in use, windows had detected a serious data corruption (or bad sector problem).

When it does this, it places a marker on the drive, so that the next time the system boots, chkdsk will automatically run and attempt to fix the corruption.

The problem that occurred, was that a major directory listing was corrupted and unrecoverable. Files in that directory, may have been left as "chk" files, but directories, but depending on the level of corruption, subdirectories, or other directories may have been more corrupted, and this would have prevented recovery of subdirectories.
Click to expand...

all the files were fine luckily. all my pdfs were renamed as chk files
 
I have used chkdsk since windows 95 and it has, up until now, never deleted any of my files. Perhaps i never noticed, but if it had deleted any files, they were few at the most. But yesterday chkdsk reared its ugly face and upon me by fixing some sectors, and deleting over 40GB of my anniversay pictures that i had temporarily on my shared MAC/WINDOWS external drive...i was planning on transferring them that night. I didnt notice for the first hour since i didn't know chkdsk could do that. I dont usually run chkdsk but a sync program i use, called goodsync, forces me to have a clean drive. This wasnt new a procedure, i had done this many times before and never had any files gone missing.

I was lucky to find a program called unchk by eric p that finds and creates the files out of the .chk files that chkdsk created in a hidden "found.***" folder. It is a simple, free program. I still havent been able to recover all my files (still processing them) but i did retrieve about 30% of them since the files were orphaned. 80% of the my files were .cr2 format which didnt help since most .chk disk programs dont recognize this format. The good thing about unchk was that it allowed me to add the format type in the ini by opening the program, then on the first screen opening up the ini and adding or removing the extensions i needed and saving the file, then continuing.

In conclusion, never share an external drive on mac and windows. Windows will delete files that are fragmented, while mac won't.

Yesterday was a very sad moment for me as the loss was significant. It was a big trip with lots of memories and time spent taking over 40 gigs of photos.
 
I'd say that the files may not be fine despite recovery. Especially video/audio files, even if the whole "middle" section of the file is garbage, whats still valid will typically play in most media players and it will just skip the corrupted sections or give you garbled noise/image (kind of like playing a partially downloaded video/audio file). Windows would still report the same file size, and you wouldnt even know until you go to play the file and it starts skipping and jumping all over the place.

Likewise, there could be just enough corruption for windows to flag the file, but not enough to degrade playback in any noticeable way.

I've run into similar chkdsk issues in the past when a drive was about to die, and after presumably successful recovery I still ran into a lot of files that would not open or were clearly corrupted. To be safe I would back up your data ASAP and replace the drive entirely considering its business critical data. Then of course, make sure you double check that everything is in working order before you need to play it at your next gig! Wouldn't want to get up there only to find out your file wont play with a club manager breathing down your neck.
 
LiuKangBakinPie said:
Ok thanks guys. I used uneraser to recover the files. They were deleted nothing wrong with them but the only problem was all my music and albums were in a folder with a number. All the album names gone. I had to recover them on another folder and tried to see which album they were on. Then all my pdfs about 200 of them were chk files. So I had to manually viewed them and named them to a pdf again. Took me a crap load of time still busy trying to sort my music out.

Wonder why windows deleted them. Its the first time chkdsk did that. Deleting perfectly good files.
Click to expand...

What's the program's name exactly, mate?
 
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