[clarinetman]

Hello,

Today I came home from school to find that my external HD (320GB WD) had been randomly corrupted of all it's data. All the folders were empty. This is very upsetting. No more music library, pictures, videos, documents, programs, nothing. Any ideas as to how I might be able to restore it? I tried using chkdsk but strangely the chkdsk box closed when I clicked the Start button...

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

[beamthegreat]

If's there a very valueable or very important information stored in there, you should Stop what you're doing and bring it to a Disk recovery center before you do more damage to the disk asap!!

 

[Jon L]

Quote:

Originally Posted by clarinetman /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hello, Today I came home from school to find that my external HD (320GB WD) had been randomly corrupted of all it's data. All the folders were empty. This is very upsetting. No more music library, pictures, videos, documents, programs, nothing. Any ideas as to how I might be able to restore it? I tried using chkdsk but strangely the chkdsk box closed when I clicked the Start button... Thanks for your suggestions.

Let me guess, your external drive is USB enclosure...

Same thing has happened to several USB enclosures, and usually it's the USB interface chip that causes issues.

First thing to try: Remove the hard drive from the USB enclosure and mount it somewhere else to see if it's still corrupted.

If it's still corruped, often what's corrupted is the master boot record (usually due to some kind of USB mishap). Two things to try:

Have the hard drive hooked up to a working computer. Right click on the hard drive, and find a utility, something like scan and repair drive. Let it run, and it often fixes the problem.

If it doesn't work, next step is a good hard drive partition recovery program, some of which have free trials. But at this point, you may opt to use a paid professional instead.

 

[clarinetman]

Thanks for your help.

As it turns out, it was my computer having some stupid deal, because I restarted and everything was fine.

Dear Vista,

I want to strangle you sometimes.

Thanks,
Alex

 

[vagarach]

Congrats on the close call! If only a simple reboot fixed all computer issues!

 

[3602]

Go fsck it, or CHKDSK.

 

[thread]

Give SpinRite a try. It has been known to resurrect hard drives in situations like this more often than not. Be warned, though, that depending on how badly the drive is trashed, it could take a really long time (days, weeks, or even more). It just tries really hard to read the data, and can do a lot of things that no other app can.

It is $90, but you can get your money back if it doesn't work out. I'm not associated with Steve Gibson at GRC labs, but he loves to talk about SpinRite on my favorite podcast, Security Now. And I happen to know it is a little known gem of the industry.

GRC*|*SpinRite 5.0 to 6.0**

 

[krmathis]

Restore from backup maybe?