External HD Failure

[Baturite]

While performing a disk defrag on a portable samsung 2TB NTFS Hard disk, I was on a boat the power just went out. Frying the BIOS battery of the laptop and causing a great deal of files on the HD to just become invalid
out of the 1,81 total space the HD gives me, I can only see 838gb, so, given that I have 181gb of free space, it therefore means that 791gb worth of files have become invalid.
I can still see them, all the folders with those 791gb are still visible, but they no longer show the regular folder icon their size is 0kb and their type is now File instead of File Folder
My antivirus softare can still access each and every file inside those folders and a HD Tune software has found no erros whatsover
so, am I right to assume that if I just have it run another disk defrag will all my folder go back to normal (accessible)?

PLLLLEASSSSSEEEE HELP

Cheers

 

[Elixer]

NO! Do NOT run defrag!
You have a case of corruption going on.

Best thing to do is CLONE the drive to another one, then run something like testdisk to try and recover the files on the cloned drive. NOT the original.
Since you were doing a defrag, the file pointers got messed up, and it is highly possible you lost everything, and you need file recovery utilities to fix it.

BTW, you should be using a UPS on a boat to prevent things like this from nuking stuff.

 

[Baturite]

any ideas as to which recovry soft I shall use?
tried Recuva, but its only good for deleted files

When enable win to show me all hidden folders I can see it all

all lost folders have been made into folders called DIR000.CHK, inside a bigger folder called Found.000

So its not gone entirely or corrupted.
Any ideas how to retrieve files from such places?

Magic Recovery Professional sees it all, but you can only retrieve them if you buy the soft, which you cant because the link doesnt work

Found one called Recover My Files, but I am not honestly paying 65 bucks on a soft which Ive no proof that it works....

 

[Baturite]

yeah, the UPS is in fact supposed to work, but they were changing breakers when it all went dpwn

 

[Elixer]

Try testdisk and see if it can salvage anything.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Remember, don't use the original drive!
You are trying to fix the FAT tables.

 

[C1]

Ya what ever happens, do not write to the original HDD, back it up then try to recover from the back up. Your information is still on the disk, but the containing & referencing structures are damaged. Go slow & dont expect to get everything back in an instant.

There are many different kinds of free recovery tools available on the "Raymond's" website: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/top-10-free-data-recovery-software/

There is also an old Norton tool that I really liked that was great for recovering ASCII from even a badly damaged HDD (cant remember the name right now but there's stuff out there).