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External hard drive wiped??
Jill_Fan
Posts: 1,565 Forum Member
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I've just noticed that quite a lot of my pictures on the external hard drive have gone. I can still see them in the folders but when I click on the folder to open it, nothing is there. Is there anyway of getting them back?
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You could take it to a computer shop that deals with repairs and the suchlike.
As long as you don't mind others looking at your pics.
Do a Google, see if there's any software that might help retrieve the pics.:)
If you go into the drive in My Computer and select Details view what do you see in the Size column? If everything is just zero then the file system could be corrupt. Which it could be anyway.
If you are using XP then try running CHKDSK on the drive. (not sure if it's the same in Vista). Open a command prompt and type
CHKDSK X:
then press Enter. Change the X to whatever drive letter the external drive is (don't omit the colon though). If that reports errors then try
CHKDSK X: /F
again change the X to whatever your drive letter is. This will attempt to fix any file system errors. If you are lucky that will get things back.
I can see all the photos in the folders, but when I click on the folders they are empty with no pictures inside, its like an empty folder. Its just strange because I can see the pictures on the outside if you know what I mean, theres just nothing in it.
I'll try what you've said.
Have the photos been hidden?
Switch on hidden files by going to:
TOOLS / FOLDER OPTIONS / VIEW
and select 'SHOW HIDDEN FILES AND FOLDERS'
Click OK
did you write to the drive after corruption?
did you do the deep scan or whatever? i haven't used recuva lately but recovery utilities generally have a second mode that takes far longer and does a more exhaustic search. i'd also reconnect the drive as internal and remove usb from the equation. assuming a corrupt usb controller created a mess of things. usb corruption is known to happen sometimes.
Done that and nothing happens
I don't understand that though. When I hover the cursor over the folders its telling me all the names of the files inside and telling me the size of the folder aswell like 40mb. Why would it say all that?
I haven't written anything to the drive since. I've done the scan twice and its recovered some but the others won't open.
Basically the database that stores all the details about the files and folders on the disk can become detached from reality and report all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff. And the pointers to the physical location of the files in the folders could become messed up as well so Windows doesn't know where to find the files.
A lot of these errors can be fixed by running CHKDSK. I would run CHKDSK before attempting any other processes.Preferably it should have been run before you used Recuva on the disk.
In both XP and Vista open the Start menu then All Programs then Accessories. Locate the Command Prompt entry.
In XP just click on it
If using Vista right click on it and select Open As Administrator.
A simple black window appears. Type
CHKDSK X: /F
then press Enter. change the X to whatever drive letter your external drive actually is.
This will run the check and attempt to fix any errors
It says theres 64,416 KB in 271 hidden files...What does this mean?
39078080 KB total disk space. 17477686 KB in 88880 files. 31956 KB in 7491 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 203891 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 21364547 KB available on disk. 512 bytes in each allocation unit. 78156161 total allocation units on disk. 42729094 allocation units available on disk.This is from my C: drive. As you can see it tells me I have 39GB allocated to C: of which 17GB or so is taken up by 88,880 (rather a lot of 8's in there
If Chkdsk really did report no errors then it should have reported how many files it found and how much space they take up.
Open the Command Prompt again and type the following
ATTRIB -H -S X:\*.* /S
Then press Enter. Change the X to the letter of your external drive as before. If there are any files hiding from you on the drive then this command might just reveal them. Bit of a long shot but you never know.
By the way there is a space between ATTRIB and the -H and between -H and -S, and -S and X then no spaces till the second * then a space and /S Make sure you get the \ and / right as well
64,448 KB in 271 hidden files
33,856 KB in 1058 folders
21, 981,376 KB in 4665 files
466,184,576 KB are available
32, 768 bytes in each allocation unit
15,258,274 total allocation units on disc
14,568,268 allocation units on disc
I've no idea what any of that means.
Its just really annoying because on 'My computer' when I put the cursor over the hard disc it says how much is used on it and around 20GB has been used. Are the files hidden somewhere or something?
I typed that and nothing has happened in the Command prompt.
21, 981,376 KB in 4665 files
Now as to why you can't see them.....
This is a simple little utility that you can run which basically shows you where your disk space is being used. It doesn't need installing, just download unzip it and run. Click the SCAN menu and select the external drive.
It will then produce a simple graph showing what folders have what amount of files. If they exist then Treesize will point you to where they are.