Help GREATLY appreciated External Hardrive Recovery question

[Memoryseeker]

I am sorry in advance for not being tech savy at all.

I had a major pc malfunction. Had to reinstall the disc, and by doing so my hardrive was deleted. But prio to that I saved everything to a external hardrive called Acom Data
I saved everything, and everything was good. Until, I accidnetly unplugged the hardrive before getting the pop up saying it was safe to remove. Which I now feel like a idiot for doing..

And since then now, unfortunitly a ton of stuff on my hardrive is just MIA... All the sentimental stuff.. Ive had this pc for about 7 years, ( yeah I knowo way to long). And so I had a ton of christmass videos, and really important family pictures and what not of people who arent with us anymore. So I cant even express how important the files are.

I am not sure what happened exactly. But a thin came up asking if I wanted to fix errors, and then somthing else...
I think it had to do with the sectors. Or somthing.. I allowed it, and it took about 40 mins.

Then a message came up saying there was some problems but that it fixed the files effected and put the files that were effected into a folder called "found."
But there is no found folder. And now the hardrive is saying that its only 111 gigs.. I am almost postive it was bigger than that.
Is there any hope to recover the missing files, either on my computer or on the external hardrive? im really desperate.

[pcimage]

Clone the drive to another using a non-windows sector cloner (e.g. Media tools pro or dd_rescue) and then run some recovery software (e.g. Rstudio or getdataback) and hopefully that should recover your data, assuming windows hasn't totally screwed it with scandisk.

Or better still, if you don't wanna do that, take it to a pro who should be able to do it all for a reasonable fee.

Good luck.

[ShaneWard]

Yeah, I agree with above, I think its a simple corrupt data, or partition, a pro should be able to recover very cheaply as nothing mechanical is damaged. Messing around with the drive now will only permently delete the files or make them unrecoverable.

Shane

[Keatah]

I'd just go straight to a pro instead of learning how to do data recovery. Sounds to me like this is important stuff you have on it.

[HaQue]

That chkdsk "FOUND" folder makes me cringe

[PlatinumDataRecovery]

Clone the drive . In case it will do clone slowly stop the process and bring it to the data recovery company.
Once you have the clone run R studio or GetDataBack for FAT or NTFS (depending what file system you have).

Good Luck

[craig6928]

people should know never use chkdsk as your data will go bye bye forever

[HaQue]

people should know never use chkdsk as your data will go bye bye forever

I know what you are saying, this isn't a dig at you, but my feelings are:

No people won't know. It is a procedure that Microsoft TELLS people they NEED to do. How are people going to know that don't have our experience.

It is the same deal as the "you need to format this disk" message for flash drives and USB connected Hard disks.

Once you start not trusting system messages, where do you stop? Do you not trust your AV solution when it tells you things?

Most people don't know anything about computers anymore. They know how to use the Apps, mostly.

The amount of malware masquerading as updates makes it risky to try and do the right thing.

The amount of advice on YouTube and forums that is bad makes it hard to research solutions and find a good one.

People also don't know how to deal with these sort of issues until it happens to them. Unfortunately it seems to be their precious photos and data that's going to be their first foray into data recovery. So they take the advice of windows/forum/next door 14 year old and then the problems start.

When I got my first proper computer, it came with a large book detailing MSDOS, another one for WFW3.11, and the disks to go with it. I knew Jacque Schmitt about computers, and tried for 4 hours to install DOS. I was following the instructions but a disk was bad. so After a new set of disks, DOS was installed then windows.. 13 or so disks IIRC. I got a "feel" for what files are, what directories are, what a program is, what a system file is etc. etc. People don't get that anymore.

How many times do you hear stupid stuff like "I saved my document in word, and now its gone".. meaning they cant see it in recent documents. They have no clue that it isn't inside word somewhere. iPads don't even want the user to think of "files" anymore.

Block your ears kids... I think these days the users with 5 years or less experience have no fucking chance

[digitalferret]

In agreement with HaQue's last.

Tho sadly 5 years of clicking [OK ]or [Cancel] maketh not an education.
People should be forced to build and install their own PC's or not allowed to own one.

Here's a copy of Arch, off you go =)

What do you mean, draconian?

Kern

(still have DOS book on shelf and at a dig, probably 3.11 DOS 5/6 floppies too. #Magpie)

[Keatah]

What terms does the iPad want you to think of (when it comes to saving files)?

Furthermore, I've had people tell me they saved their stuff in "the microsoft". And they couldn't tell me if it was graphics or text. Or what part of office they were using. There are people that don't know the difference between "cloud" and "local", or between a "shortcut icon" and actual "application"..

[Keatah]

All those old days of the Apple II and PC MS-DOS turned out to be an invaluable education today when it comes to system management operations.

I *STILL* have my WFW311 & MSDOS622 manuals. I swear, all my old PC manuals take up like a meter or two on the bookshelves. Took me days to figure out how to format and move things and to just even install MSDOS took me all weekend.

I have even more Apple II material, but that's collector's (hoarder) stuff.

I miss the days of having to manually park the heads on some disks. NOT! I swear, I had a disk that required you to run a program to do so, and I didn't know about it, and the damn thing up and died on me just weeks into its service life.

[digitalferret]

Oh well, thread completely derailed now so apologies:

hells teeth, i remember Park.
must be 89 ish on a 20 meg Akhter pc and a CLAITS course.

We were so green the lecturer had to show us how to switch the box on having sat there 30 mins wondering what to do. Usually you just turned up and everything was working so we had no idea.

btw thats a 20 meg hard drive for those used to a G or T not an M bytes prefix.
memory was in k.

DOS Served me well a few weeks back. Win7 wouldn't let a client access files as it locked up in some sort of temporary login state.
Used command prompt and dos commands to navigate and move files over.
There's still a lot to be said for CLI and arguments.

For those interested, or tired of forgetting you're in Windows and issuing a linux command try http://wiki.github.com/bmatzelle/gow/ (gnu on windows)
Mandatory geek ware.

[HaQue]

What terms does the iPad want you to think of (when it comes to saving files)?

well really Apple seem to want the users to use the apps and not think about much else. you could conceivably take photos, edit them, upload the email them, edit them again, add them to another app etc etc without ever using anything remotely like a file manager. You work with the picture, as opposed to in a windows world you go to file-->save. file-->open. then edit, file-->save, change apps, file-->open. etc. you know... a bit tricky to explain the concepts.

At the school I do IT for, we have 50 odd iPads with the profiles of them managed through Apple configurator (I have nicknamed it Apple Confuserator). You can take video and pictures, but you cannot get the photos/video off the device by connecting it through USB, the disk does not show up, the only way is to use the pic from the camera-roll. It was a few hours of trying everything even programs like Copytrans suite which is a replacement for iTunes that does away with the limitations.

you don't "save" your progress in apps and "load" the savegame.. it is all transparent. If you DO want to work directly with files and the filesystem, for the most part you need to muck around with 3rd party apps and dropbox etc.

and your comments after "furthermore" yes ditto, see that kind of stuff all the time. And to be honest, people don't want to know. I showed someone a few days ago how to access facebook pictures from peoples accounts that were locked down if the person had been viewed on the PC by looking at temp files. they had no clue that the computer had to "download" a file to see it and kept saying that they never downloaded them, etc.