How should I try to repair corrupted data?
Asked by
Zyx (
4170
)
February 20th, 2012
I had a folder with all my music in it and now it’s scrambled. Initially it showed me some of the original folders along with folders and files that weren’t supposed to be there. Completely random names and extensions, with some characters I’ve never seen before. So I decided to let windows check the external drive for errors (it’s always offering to). What has happened is that the folders which remained have also been replaced with unreadable data and I seem to have lost about 200GB in total. I can’t imagine how this happened but I’d appreciate any advice or comment.
(Looking at the behaviour of the disk it seems like the folders broke rather than the files but I really wouldn’t know)
EDIT: Windows 7, WD Elements 1TB
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8 Answers
Thank you for the warning—- I have been leery of letting “Windows check for errors” and have always refused. I will continue to do so.
What I have done with damaged files is try on different extensions and use “open with” and sometimes I come up lucky and save a bit here and there.
I made the mistake of allowing windows to Check disk on one of my flashdrives, it made the problem even worse because now it was corrupting every file it was checking that would make it even harder to fix.
I grabbed a free copy of Recurva, and scanned the disc and said that a majority of the files were unrecoverable because Windows messed with them, but after forcing it to restore it all anyway, I luckily got every single file back. I would recommend giving that a shot.
Owch. I second recuva, if that doesn’t work I’m not sure what will. Make sure you have a differnt drive to recover the stuff to.
Running Recuva now, 30% and 0 files recovered, doesn’t look good.
It says the files have been overwritten with each other… or something… I can’t say any of this makes much sense yet.
Still 30%
Hours later
ETA has quintupled
Definitely sounds bad. You might consider running chkdsk
CHKDSK is my “go to” tool for corrupted files/disks, and I keep Recuva around for other reasons. However, if it takes more than about an hour for a 1TB drive, I suspect some severe file system issues; the sort that even reformatting the drive may not fix :(
Had to shut recuva down and I noticed explorer was acting strange so I reset my computer. It’s been telling me I need to format the disk since I started recuva… Anything that might still help???
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