Not tech savvy noob here, who apparently just trashed her own External Hard drive.
Well according to <a href="http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=28649">THIS</a> I f**ked it up major. I wish I had read these forums before using Ccleaner.
My mistake was thinking Wipe Free Space was cleaning up things to make "space". But now I find out it is used to clear off an external that you wish to dispose of or sell. So no one can see what you've had on your HD.
I've done the wipe free space once before and didn't lose any data. This time I messed up. I did it the other night. And yesterday when I went to put some things on a data disc for a friend I noticed some files were empty. Other files were filled with stuff (high gb's of gibberish) that couldn't be deleted.
So I thought I'd run Wipe Free Space again and maybe it would clean up the empty files and gibberish. And it was working. But then at 8% I thought. Crikey this will take all night. I hit cancel. The system FROZE and I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even get a task panel to show up by hitting control, alt, delete. So I pushed the power button on the CPU and restarted the computer and now I can't open the N drive (the external at all)
Western Digital 320mb external hard drive
Message when you click on the drive? The Disk In Drive N is not formatted. Do you wish to format it now? Yes, or No
When you click Yes it says
Format Local Disc N Capacity 298 gbs
File System: NTFS
Allocation Unit Size? Default Allocation side is selected bu there are other choices)
512bytes
1024 bytes
2048 bytes
4096 bytes
Volume Label (empty nothing written there)
Format Options (neither of the below are checked)
Quick Format
Enable Compression
When you click Start a warning appears stating you will lose data
Formatting will erase ALL data on this disk. To format the disc click ok. To quit click cancel.
How to I save the data which was on this external hard drive. It was filed with my digital photographs, music, concert videos and more. I'd really like to get something back as non of it can be replaced. Any suggestions?