Everything on my external hdd gone!!!

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by ShlnMilk, Aug 30, 2006.

  1. ShlnMilk

    ShlnMilk Member

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    Everything was working fine until today. I turned it on and it seems like my external hdd has been formatted or something. I try to explore my external hdd, but a thing popup saying that I need to format it. I renamed it to "External hdd" and now the name is "Local Disk" and everything is gone. What's going on here!!??

    It's a Western Digital 320gb that is running on a firewire...
     
    ShlnMilk, Aug 30, 2006
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  2. DoubleDwn

    DoubleDwn Regular member

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    Get a program called PC Inspector, or PC File Inspector (dont rememebr the exatc name). It has the capability to recover lost/formatted/missing logical drives and hopefully can bring back some files.

    Good luck.

    ~Rich
     
    DoubleDwn, Aug 31, 2006
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  3. ShlnMilk

    ShlnMilk Member

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    Alright... I'll check that out. But I'm wondering, how did this occur? It was working fine yesterday...
     
    ShlnMilk, Aug 31, 2006
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  4. DoubleDwn

    DoubleDwn Regular member

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    ???? Just one of those things I guess. Could you possibly have disconnected it while it was doing a write? Have yo lost power recently? Could just be a fluke, or could be a number of things. Check out the Event Log and see if you can find any errors related to the drive. Start>Run>eventvwr.msc


    ~Rich
     
    DoubleDwn, Aug 31, 2006
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  5. ShlnMilk

    ShlnMilk Member

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    The only thing I can think of disconnecting it while doing a write, but I'm almost positive I did not do that... I check the Event log and there is not error related to this drive. I'll just run the pc inspector then... Hopefully, I recover some files.
     
    ShlnMilk, Aug 31, 2006
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  6. ddp

    ddp Moderator Staff Member

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    ddp, Aug 31, 2006
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  7. shzzlnzzl

    shzzlnzzl Member

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    ShlnMilk, (this may be what DoubleDwn is referring to)

    After going through many mysterious hdd issues (and simply using chkdsk -f did nothing), I used this bit of freeware:

    http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

    It is very easy to use, and recovered everything that had NOT been overwritten yet (system files as well). A few things to note:

    Don't install it on the drive you want to recover, and make sure you have a good drive to xfer all of the data to with enough free space.

    Post if you have any other problems.

    Oh, and hard drives were built to fail.....
     
    shzzlnzzl, Sep 1, 2006
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  8. DoubleDwn

    DoubleDwn Regular member

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    Yup....thats the prog. Its been a while since I used it, but I remember it working just like shzzlnzzl said. Got back almost all the data. Good luck.

    ~Rich
     
    DoubleDwn, Sep 1, 2006
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