Hard drive disappeared!

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Inayat

Member
Jan 31, 2002
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OK, this is quite peculiar.

For some reason, one of my 160 GB hard drives, which was formatted in NTFS, has lost it?s label in windows explorer and is unable to be selected.

When double clicked, it displays the message:

?The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.?

In disk management, the drive appears as ?Healthy (Active)? with percentage free equaling 100%. This drive was (is), in reality, almost entirely full. The ?file system? field is blank in disk management.

This was being used in a W2K system that would be turned on and off sometimes just using the power button. Maybe this was not a good idea it would seem.

Any idea of what happened here?

Any suggestions of how to fix this?

I?m not too worried about it yet and I?m sure that software recovery could get at the data, the only problem being that I don?t have enough free space elsewhere to recover 152GB of data.

Is there a simple way to get windows to see my drive for what it is?

Any way to uncorrupt it or am I looking at a full software recovery?

I tried GetDataBack once before. How does that stack up vs. other programs. Any better suggestions?

Thanks!

EDIT: I tried GetDataBack, not GetRight, which is a download program.
 
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piesang

Member
Jun 23, 2004
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My drive also did that, I traced it to write caching being enabled when the pc lost power. This caused the filesystem to get screwed up. I could recover all the data using R-tools.
 
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Inayat

Member
Jan 31, 2002
82
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0
The drive is in a second computer that is basically being used for downloading and network storage. It has the OS, eMule, and three big shared drives.

Nothing big happened prior to this happening.

I turned it off once, and then sometime later I noticed that my "Music1" drive was no longer shared. I go in to investigate and find that things are as I described in my original post.

R-Tools as in http://www.r-tt.com/ ?

Which specific utility did you use?

I assume it couldn't just "fix" the disk, you had to copy the recovered data to another disk and then eventually format the original and copy the data back, right?

Thanks!
 
I

Inayat

Member
Jan 31, 2002
82
0
0
Yeah, its bad, but at least I have no reason to believe that software recovery won't work.

Sucks is when I was reinstalling my OS and in the process had copied everything from my main disk to my second disk, so I could format the original and have a clean start, when my second disk, the one with all the information, pictures, work, original music, etc, had a mechanical failure DURING INSTALLATION and died with a fateful click-click, click-click, click-click.

Now that sucks. No software can fix that problem; nothing I can do about it save pay $2,000 for physical recovery. I still have that disk and someday when I win my first big poker tournament, or otherwise come into some big money, I will have it done.

Fortunately, I was able to recover some information imperfectly from the formatted, XP installed main disk. First thing I did was rip it out and try recovery programs. The directory structure was fried and many files were lost / damaged on account of the format and subsequent XP install, which wiped over pieces of my files. Nevertheless, I got 60 % or something back. Still a pretty crappy experience all around.

Until then, believe me, I?m glad this is a software / hard drive data problem rather than a mechanical failure.

-------------------------------

So . . .

It seems everyone likes R-Studio.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!
 
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