timwtheov

@DennisD Yes, I think small amounts are what I'm left with, since neither program recommended on here works. I think what happened was the Chkdsk repaired something and made the file system not show up in Windows, for when I went to Disk Manager just now, the file system said "RAW" and not NTFS, as it should. Possibly that's why everything is so slow. Or it could just be the errors. At any rate, I was just able to recover a few mp3s, so that's something.

Sorry to not include the file system type on the corrupted external: it's NFTS. I'm pretty much fed up by the dd_rescue, so I'll try a couple of these alternatives, which I thank you all for. Oh, and I was going to try TestDisk and PhotoRec, but each said they were going to take about 56 hours to complete, a daunting amount of time.

Hi Dennis D, Yes, I do know how to burn an .img file. I did so with BootMed, and the disc has been running for about 36 hours straight, trying create the image of the corrupted external harddrive on another external harddrive. That seems like a long time to me, but a) the corrupted external may have extensive corruption and it is 300 gb (give or take) of data. I did note that on the cmd window in Ubuntu, it keeps saying that there is an input/output error and "Block damaged" or something like that (I'm not in front of that computer right now); if you know anything about the messages in this tool when it's working, and this looks like it's not going to recover an image of the drive, let me know, and I'll stop it immediately when I get back home (I did a search in the BootMed forum and in their manual, but found nothing on these messages). Anyway, in the Ubuntu boot, I was actually able to see all the files on the corrupted drive and was even able to copy a few folders over; but it kept hanging up and stopping, so I've tried the dd_rescue/create image tool. If it doesn't finish by tomorrow morning, though, I'm going to have to stop it, as I need my laptop back!

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not sure how the drive was corrupted--it just stopped working properly last week (going really slow when transferring files, and sometimes locking up altogether). And I did a chkdsk with both boxes checked initially, then one at a time after both boxes checked failed more than once. I now keep getting the message from Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium (sorry for leaving that out) that the hard drive needs to be reformatted after running chkdsk succeeded (I think the top box checked was the last one I did). After my initial post, I did have success recovering about 8 mp3s, but after that Recuva wouldn't recover any more. I'll try BootMed and the other programs (if it doesn't work) sometime soon.

Wait--I take that back. I had checked that box. I have a number of non-deleted files showing up in the window that pops up after a scan. I just tried to recover some of the audio files again, and I was told that the system could find none of those I had checked (approximately 300-400 mp3s).

No--I'll try this and report back.

Hi, I've done a scan of an external hard drive that had file-system errors on it, and while I can see all the files (a mix of video, audio, and documents: mp3, wmv, flac, docx, etc.) in the Recuva window after the scan, when I try to recover to either my C drive or another external hard drive, all I get are a few random text files, bin files, and so on--none of the mp3s, flacs, etc. I had Recuva set to recover the external hard drive's folder structure, and while I can see this folder structure on the C and other external hard drive, the files within those folders are not the same. I've tried recovering every found file, and then a couple of selected files, but all to no avail. Basically, I just get the same few text and bin files mentioned above any way I do the recovery. Hopefully, I just have something set wrong, but if so, I can't find it. Help!