I have been using my Samsung 500GB HDD for so long and all my videos, documents, music were on that disk. Suddenly the hard disk stopped working and gives me an error saying "You need to format the disk before you can use it". The HDD is in RAW format now and used and free space is 0. I tried chkdsk on the hard drive and it seems to delete all the orphaned files which means its deleting all the files on the HDD as every file on external HDD is orphaned, so I stopped the CHKDSK. Whats the best data recovery tool out there and if there is one, can I recover the data with the same folder structure like it was.

Any help can be appreciated. This is most important to me.

As you have found out DIY comes with risks.

Running chkdsk was not a good idea as you have seen.
Putting it simply chkdsk is not data recovery friendly.

TRC do a software that will tell you what extention the .chk is http://trcdatarecovery.com/articles/chkdsk then you can rename the .chk to say .jpg as an example but you wont have file names or folder structure. Its going to be a lot of hard work renaming the extenstions unless you can organise them in folders ie jpg, doc, docx etc then you could rename them possibly in a batch using cmd.

Loki

hi, I got the same erreur with windows just take
GetDataBack and try to open the HDD files with this prog, make a copy of your files, and after format it etc,
the best thing with HDD, 500 or up its partition in two partitions 250 go