chkdsk lost my files

[Irwin]

Hello and happy thanksgiving.

I ran chkdsk on my drive with both auto fix and try to recover enabled,
and now most of my files are gone. What is a good tool to recover the
files in this instance?

Thanks,
IMF

 

[Irwin]

More details. Using windows 2000. The drive is an external hard drive
was fat32. The drive says that it is still using 14 gb, 24 gb free,
although the only thing left on the drive using explorer are five small
files in the root directory. The files lost were all of my backup
files. They were all in a folder called Tosh2775, which had subfolders
beneath them. Now all I have are a few files in the root, which files
by the way I do not recognize, and the Tosh2775 folder is gone.

Thanks,
IMF

 

[Sid Knee]

Don't know the answer to your question, Irwin but I'm interested in the
problem and there's some more info that you may be able to give that
might assist in getting an answer.

Is the external hard drive a USB drive and if so is that its sole
configuration? Some external drives are NAS drives (network attached
storage) and can be connected in other ways as well as via USB. For
example, I have one which is normally connected via ethernet. The OS on
the drive itself is Linux-based although the filesystem is fat32 and the
drive can also be connected to a USB port and read/written by a Windows
machine.

Given how finicky some of these devices are (the Linux/fat/windows
interface never seems to be *quite* trouble-free ... for example, some
people have had trouble if they preformat the drive to fat32 on a
windows system before installing it in the NAS box - it's safer to let
the NAS OS do the formatting) I would hesitate to run a chkdsk on it via
the USB port from windows.

It was your mention of fat32 that made me wonder if it was a NAS drive.
These devices typically use fat32 because of the proprietary
restrictions on ntfs.

 

[Irwin]

Hi. No, it is just a standard fat32 USB external hard drive that I use
to backup the laptop. Many (most?) commercial externals come formatted
as FAT32, in my experience of a dozen or so. No NAS or other specific
issue. I had googled it first to see if others had done it, and I saw a
few reputable-sounding sites that discussed it like it was no big deal,
so I proceeded.

Thanks,
IMF

 

[Sid Knee]

Thanks, Irwin, it was just a thought. The reason these things come
formatted as fat32 then, is probably the same .... ntfs is proprietary
so they can't sell drives formatted that way.

Hope you find the answer to your problem and hope you can rescue your files.

 

[Rod Speed]

Try the obvious file recovery systems.

I like Easy Recovery Pro.

 

[Edwin vMierlo]

NTFS does not guarantee the integrity of user data following an instance of
disk corruption

there may be files that CHKDSK cannot recover

vitally important that critical data be protected by means of a regimen of
periodic backups


If you wonder where I got the above info, have a look here :
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/187941
Basically, once you have some sort of filesystem corruption, and you run
CHKDSK, it will comeback with a workable filesystem, but it doesn't mean all
your files will be there, even when the files are there, it not even means
that the data in the files is there.

CHKDSK is a file system repair utility, use it to repair file-systems.
(please not filesystem is not a file !)

hope this explains it
Rgds,
Edwin.