Ok so I was doing some copy paste from my external drive to my desktop and a storm kicked off the power for a couple seconds. When I turned the computer back on my destination folder was missing. 'my computer' still shows the hard drive has occupied space ( the correct amount) but my 'avi movies' folder isn't listed anymore. If anyone knows how to get it back I would appreciate it. Thanks.
It's an easy fix. You need to do a scandisk (with the boxes to fix errors checked) on your external. This should fix the file corruption. Symptoms of file corruption is when the drive shows unallocated/raw/drive not formatted errors. If that doesn't work the free "testdisk" has more powerful tools to recover lost/corrupt partitions. Worst case scenario, Testdisk has a addon called "photorec" that can recover data from a severely corrupted drive. In most cases a scandisk or even a chkdsk will fix the problem. All your data is still recoverable, just a few misplaced bits will make the entire drive unusable but everything is still there.
The drive with the problem is an internal one not the external. So will the suggested advice still work?
Yes, the same applies to internal drives. Run it as advised and let us know of your findings. If that doesn't work you might run an "undelete" program to try and recover the files. http://www.portablefreeware.com/?sc=188
Thanks for the help guys. I ran the scan disc with no avail. I also ran the photorecov and it 'found' and 'copied' 168 gigs worth of data which is what I lost to a secondary hard drive. However it put all the files in different folders that consist if thousands of smaller files, mainly mp3 files. So is there a way to take these files and recompile them back tithe avi files they started out as? Or should I just call it a loss? I'm leaning more towards tgesecond option only because I have most of the movies on DVDs already but I would still lose around 50 gigs worth of them. That and I don't see this problem getting fixed unless I did something g wrong with the programs when I ran them to begin with.
My harddrive got jarred during writing, and then only reported 300 out of the 500 GB's. Right now I'm running testdrive and it saw 500 gb's but now is saying "read error on sector xxxxx/60800." does this mean its not going to be able to do anything?
@ wabash if runtime can't get anything use this it can recover files even after a reformat http://www.pandorarecovery.com/download/ @ jc Run chkdsk including surface scan
