Hi there

Hoping someone can help me in allaying my fear that I've gone and inadvertently bricked my data on my HDD...

I have a Samsung 2TB HDD in a StarTech external HDD case. Connects via USB 2.0. I normally have this plugged into my iMac, but occasionally I switch between an Acer PC laptop. I'm usually very careful and will eject via the OS first, then power off the case, then unplug.

So a few weeks ago I was using the iMac as per normal and then accessed the Samsung HDD, but unexpectedly the 'waiting' beachball icon kicked in. After a while I figured the filesystem had hung so I forced shut down of the iMac. Because I got concerned the filesystem might have got a problem, I switched off and unplugged the HDD, then plugged it into my PC and fired it up.

I then panicked a little when Windows 7 suggested the drive couldn't be read because it hadn't been formatted and asked me to. I clicked cancel.

I then opened a command window and typed in chkdsk - I can't quite remember the error messages but it was along the lines of 'your folder destination is corrupted (XXX)' where XXX is a number. This line repeated about 100 times with a different XXX number on each line.

So stupidly at this stage, being rather worried I decided to try running a chkdsk /f command on the HDD. As this ran, chkdsk appeared to run through the error lines as before to fix each one.

However, the end result is that there is now only 1 folder visible when I access the drive, regardless whether it's from the iMac or the PC!!

There were many files and folders originally on this drive, as there was over 1GB of data on the drive.

I've not accessed or done anything else to the HDD since as I'm terrified I'll screw more things up. Can anyone help me with this? I'd be really grateful for any advice here.

Cheers

Ben

Though I understand why you did it, bad move using chckdsk. Cardinal sin in the data recovery business.

Advice over the forum will not be much meaningful. The best is probably to have a pro look at it. If do not want to take it to a pro, maybe someone can investigate remotely. Either way someone experienced has to look at the logical structure of the drive.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Oh crap...

I take it none of the off-the-shelf data rescue / recovery programs are useful in this scenario then?

You can still try off the shelf software to see what it finds. Needless to say, I highly recommend you create a clone to a new drive. Careful how you are doing this with regard to source destination config!!! You do not want to overwrite the source drive you want to recover data from.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thanks for your thoughts so far labtech.

Can you give me some advice on the best way to:

(a) clone to a new drive (will it still pick up all the data on the drive even though the files are not showing up in Explorer/Finder ?)

(b) which data recovery program to try in this instance?

I plan to buy a new hard drive anyway so I'm keen to try resolving this problem as long as I can preserve the original drive.

Naturally, I'd like to recover the files along with their original filenames and folder structure if possible. If I send it to a pro is there a better likelihood of this happening?

The clone is block by block identical copy/clone, given that there are not issues with the media itself and so on.

To do this you can use a variety of software utilities, such as DMDE, R-Studio, dd_rescue (careful with this one if inexperienced), etc.

Also, have to consider what you are creating, a clone as in a physical drive (recommend) or an image file (which is really like a clone but it is a file, hence not physical. This will be important in terms of deciding how you will scan for your data, what toll and so on.

As far as files retaining the original names, this is where the chckdsk issue comes into place. Chckdsk likely destroyed the logical structure of the data, so not so sure that original names can be retained. I doubt it will be possible. Hence, I recommended for a pro.

Best wishes.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

OK I'll get to work on buying a new drive to clone the HDD.

One thing I forgot to mention - when I ran the chkdsk /f, the process took less than a couple of seconds to complete to go through and do the 'fixing'. So hopefully does this mean a better outcome in retaining the original files?

as similar posts here (probably you did not bother searching)

anyway, you may download the demo ver. of r-studio and see what you will get @ the end.
but i suggest do not save anything else on it till you get files out of it.
hope this will work with you

good luck man

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein