Strange occurrence with 2 hard drives

[wesdirectley]

I had a very strange thing happen this week. I bought a new internal DVD burner to replace a broken one. When I installed it I believe I may have bumped the cable for my backup hard drive (named b:/). I didn't notice it until I rebooted my PC and a different drive was not showing up. It was my Photo drive (named p:/). The strange thing was when I started troubleshooting and noticed the b:/ drive cable was disconnected, but the b:/ drive was still accessible on my PC. I thought for sure I had mislabeled one of the drives as the b:/ drive was completely unplugged. After troubleshooting for 3 days, I realized when I plug in both the b:/ and the p:/ drives, only b:/ showed up. When I unplug either one, the b:/ still appears. When I unplug both, the b:/ drive is gone.

My conclusion is somehow my p:/ drive was basically turned into an exact copy of the b:/ drive. I have no clue how this could have happened. I had thousands of pictures on the p:/ drive and need to get them back. I ran a data recovery scan with Stellar Phoenix Window Data Recovery to see if any of the files were somewhere on the p:/ drive, but I only saw the files I have access to on the b:/ drive.

Does anyone know what I can do to recover those files? Or is there something I'm not seeing here? It's beyond me as to why my computer suddenly thought the p:/ drive was my backup drive or why/how it could have deleted all of my files and copied the files from the b:/ drive considering it was disconnected. I accessed the p:/ the same day as I changed the DVD player and all the files were there. No matter which port I plug the hard drive into, the p:/ never shows up. The backup drive was not a raid drive. It was an independent drive I use to save important files. Unfortunately, I had not backed up my pictures in awhile.

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate

[sathyan]

DIY attempts on drives with important data is not advised.
In your case, as the drives are working, a pro recovery shouldn't cost much(if the data is not overwritten as you think it has happened).

Whatever ideas you get, do not write anything to the drives

Firstly, how many Hard drives are installed in your system...?
Was there any autoupdate or sync softwares installed in your system.?
Its difficult to understand how your data was automatically overwritten..

If you want a DIY approach..
Correctly identify which physical drive you had your data(b:/)

Take that drive to another PC , and run recovery tools like R-studio and check if you can find your data.

Do not write / modify / format that drive till you have got all your data and verified them.

[wesdirectley]

I have 6 drives total

The new DVD burner is a SATA drive. Whereas I had the older type connection (forgive me for not know the technical term). That was really the only difference. I don't do auto updates on anything. I truly have no idea how it happened. The drive was working fine until I plugged the DVD burner in.

I unplugged every hard drive except for the p:/ drive and it still shows up as backup. I checked it with another computer and its the same thing. Only files from the backup drive show up.

The hard drive is 300GB and was prob half full. How much do you think I'll be charged for this? It couldn't come at a worse time financially speaking. Obviously, I can't put a price on those photos, but I have no money right now.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my question. Any advise is greatly appreciated. I definitely won't put anything else on it or format it.

Side note: I took out both drives and plugged them into my laptop and they are identical. Is it possible the PC somehow thought the P and B drives were RAID drives or something?

[sathyan]

Whereas I had the older type connection (forgive me for not know the technical term)

PATA

I took out both drives and plugged them into my laptop and they are identical. Is it possible the PC somehow thought the P and B drives were RAID drives or something?

Not , if you had not configured it so.

When I installed it I believe I may have bumped the cable for my backup hard drive (named b:/).

How were you doing your backups ?
Manually drag n drop or automatically using any utility?

The hard drive is 300GB and was prob half full.

How much data(overwritten) is it showing now?
If data from your backup has been written to this drive, All the data in the area that was overwritten will be lost completely.

Identify the physical drive which contained your "Photo drive", and run recovery softwares like Photorec or run a raw recovery (on a different system) to see if you can get any of your old data.

If you are not sure which physical drive contained your data, you may have to run a scan on all the drives.

Also try to scan your old/in use storage devices like sd cards/ flash cards/ pen drives for deleted photos (which were used to take the photos or transfer them)
Because if your data is overwritten, its lost for ever.

Take pro help for a proper diagnosis of what and how it happened and chances of recovery.

[poehere]

I have 6 drives total

The new DVD burner is a SATA drive. Whereas I had the older type connection (forgive me for not know the technical term). That was really the only difference. I don't do auto updates on anything. I truly have no idea how it happened. The drive was working fine until I plugged the DVD burner in.

I unplugged every hard drive except for the p:/ drive and it still shows up as backup. I checked it with another computer and its the same thing. Only files from the backup drive show up.

The hard drive is 300GB and was prob half full. How much do you think I'll be charged for this? It couldn't come at a worse time financially speaking. Obviously, I can't put a price on those photos, but I have no money right now.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my question. Any advise is greatly appreciated. I definitely won't put anything else on it or format it.

Side note: I took out both drives and plugged them into my laptop and they are identical. Is it possible the PC somehow thought the P and B drives were RAID drives or something?

If you are 100% sure this has happened which does not sound too likely I would do this one first.

Remove all your drives that are not your system drive and test them one at a time with a USB external connection. Verify all the data on all the drive. Make sure you do have a back up drive twice and not one of them has photos on it at all. Check all your file structure on all the drive. You say they are working

Now if this one is your photo drive and it now only has backup data on this do this one. Clone the drive to a new drive. Reason I say this one you do not want to do anything else with this drive for any reason at all

Now take your cloned drive and run a DR program on this one. I would suggest RStudio and scan for lost and deleted files. See if you find what you are looking for. If you do purchase this progam and write all your data to another drive. Now and only now can you take your drive and format this one and put the data back on it if you want to do this one.

You can try this one first. There is a good program for linux that should clone the drive for you and it is a GUI program so it is free. But do not run free DR program or ripped off ones. You can download a test or trial version of the software use it and see if you find what you are looking for. If you do then purchase this one. Then get back the data you have lost.

If this fails then you can look for a DR company. But this is the only DIY you should do on this drive now. Nothing else at all. But do not work on the drive with your problem if you want back your photos.

[wesdirectley]

Thank you for the responses.

I was backing up by copy and paste on the backup drive. The photo drive shows everything that's in the backup drive. The thing is, none of those backup files were on the photo drive to begin with. They were backups of a different drive.

I do know which drive is the photo drive. I had it marked from the day I installed it.

I guess I'll go ahead and clone the photo drive and try to recover the data from the cloned drive. I like that idea. I'm so leery of trying to do anything to the original drive.

This is so weird. I still have no idea how this could've happened. I've checked each drive individually and confirmed they were all marked correctly. I really wish the photo drive would've taken over the backup drive instead of vice versa. UGH

[sathyan]

Something regarding Drive configuration changed, and from a moment to the other your system used drive with the photos as a RAID 1 mirror of the other drive ....

But according to the op the other drive was disconnected ...

When I installed it I believe I may have bumped the cable for my backup hard drive (named b:/)

The strange thing was when I started troubleshooting and noticed the b:/ drive cable was disconnected,

I do know which drive is the photo drive. I had it marked from the day I installed it.

@ wesdirectley
As there is confusion about which was the original Photo drive(hopefully its not been overwritten), You can start, as poehere suggested by connecting each of the 6 drives one by one to another system and properly identify the data is correct according to your marking(labeling).

Then , if you have two physical drives with identical data(of backup drive), try to clone the drive and scan the clone .

I was backing up by copy and paste on the backup drive. The photo drive shows everything that's in the backup drive.

This is so weird. I still have no idea how this could've happened.

Are you sure your photo drive, (named p:/), was not a partition on some other drive?
And you had no RAID or Auto-sync tools installed ?
If you are not sure, you may have to scan all the drives rather than the drive you think contained your photos.

[poehere]

From what you have said is this one. You old Lecture DVD went bad and you purchased a new one that was SATA. All you did was plug in the SATA lecture and it changed all configurations on your drives. You said that one cable was disconnected. Now you say that no matter what you do you have 2 back up drives that look the same.

Did you happen to rename your drives. Such as backup drive and photo drive. It does not matter what the letter is and it can change depending on what is plugged in and when. but the name of the drive will not change if you rename this one.

Considering you say this is not a RAID drive but a drive that you use to manually back up your other drives on. The photo drive as you say was not part of a RAID either.

From what you say you were copying and pasting the files from the other drive to your backup drive. You do not have an automatic backup program installed on your system to do a backup for you. You do this one on your own.

Yes this seems strange that the two drives to you appear to have the same data on both drives. If what you say is right then if by chance you had your photo drive in place of your back up drive and you copy and pasted a file to this drive it should not over write your photos. it should just add to the data that is on the drive. You did not by any change format this drive to do a new backup on it??? I have had people who do this sort of back up and before they start so they can do it quicker they will format the drive then backup again. Did you do this one? If you did not do this then follow through with what I said. Clone the drives in question and scan them. You can try a forensic program to scan the drive for signatures of the jpeg files and see if they are still there and not over written. How much did you write to this drive??

You will need to scan for lost and deleted files. When you use a DR progam to try and locate the photos on your drive.