A friend of mine gave me his Western Digital 300.00 GB external hard drive which is at least a couple of years old. He stored his personal data files including documents and a bunch of movies and music files that he downloaded from multiple sources. His personal data files are still accessible, but the rest of the data is inaccessible. It shows that only a few gigabytes worth of free space are left on the hard drive. I cannot see any other folders other than his personal documents.
I ran chkdsk /f /r on the drive, but it is taking up a lot of time to complete the task. I canceled the task due to impatience.
I would like to know what are my options for data recovery. What software applications should I consider to recover the other data stored on this hard drive? How can I tell if this is even possible? Finally, if he decides to delete the partition and reformat the hard drive, is there any guarantee that the hard drive will be in good condition so that he can continue to use it?
I have this weekend to help him to solve his problem. Thank you.
