cowboydan76

Dennis, Power Data Recovery found the missing partition and all the files I imagine are on it, so at least I have that in my back pocket for $69 (sure as hell beats $1000+ for a clean room). I'm running the Lazesoft scan as I write this, so hopefully that will find it and hook me up for free. I wasn't sure if I could recover to the original drive or not...thought perhaps it was doable since it's all theoretically there already, but I certainly wouldn't have done that without checking first. Glad you saved me the trouble of asking. I guess I need to wait for my warranty replacement of ANOTHER defective Buffalo Hard Drive to reach me so I'll have somewhere to put the data. I'll let you know how Lazesoft does.

Okay I'll look into that once a couple scans I'm currently running are finished. The full scan from the partition wizard is still only about half done...I'd say it has at least 12 hours left. It did just find, within the last few minutes, two 3 MB partitions labeled "Boot" whose status it lists as lost/deleted. Could these be the key to finding all my data again? If so, might they be recoverable despite the lost/deleted tag? I'm sure I'll find out when the scan completes, but I'm a bit on edge waiting for that moment. I'm also running the minitool power data recovery free addition. That scan will be done soon. It's found/identified hundreds of thousands of files and 3 boot records. I guess we'll see what that turns up.

Here it is. I'm sure you can tell, but New Volume (E) is the one that's in play.

Thank you Dennis. I downloaded that program as you suggested. I ran a quick scan with the partition recover wizard tool (is that what you wanted me to do?), and it showed the following: File System: NTFS Label: New Volume Starting LBA: 63 Ending LBA: 1953520064 Used size: 115.41 MB Size: 931.51 GB Status: Existing I don't know if the 115 MB is the sum of the various misceallaneous mp3, gif, png, etc. files that Recuva was able to find on it, or what that might be. Obviously I'd say it hasn't yet found a significant portion of my Data. I'm currently running the full scan to see if that will come up with more. Let me know if there's anything I could be doing in the mean time. Thanks!

Here's my situation: I had a 1 TB external hard drive whose very badly-designed USB connection featured little metal prongs that sat inside the casing and plugged in to the USB cable. Unfortunately, being very weak and ill-considered, several of them broke off into the USB cable itself, such that the drive would no longer receive power or a connection to the computer. I'm pretty sure the drive was near full when this occurred, though I'm not 100% sure, as I let it sit for a while before trying to fix it. I took it to my local computer store and they put it in a new enclosure. They informed me that it powered on, but behaved as if it had no data and had never been initialized before. Obviously not what I wanted to hear. I got Recuva, and ran a deep scan. Initially I didn't know I had to specify that it should look for non-deleted files in cases of a damaged or formatted drive. That being the case, that initial scan turned up 10 flv files and one mov file ranging between about 200 MB and 1.9 GB. This would be consistent with some of the smaller videos that I would have saved to the drive, though they would have almost universally have been in MPG format. I was able to quickly recover one of the flv files, and got it to play on Windows Media Player despite the incorrect extension. It consitituted a portion of a boxing card that I had saved, though the quality appears to have diminished. Hardly unwatchable, but I doubt it was as good as the original version. The scan also ignored 97 files...which sounded like it might be consistent, give or take, with the number of videos I might have saved on the drive. I believe the partial video I played from the recovery was most likely a working segment of a larger video that I later combined and saved as a larger file on the drive, but which to this point I haven't found. After I realized that my scan hadn't necessarily looked for files that I hadn't deleted, I re-ran a deep scan with the necessary option clicked. It showed what I believe to be the same flv and mov files from earlier. It also turned up quite a few mp3 files. There are several versions of a file that has the name "Richard Vaughan.mp3," which is not a file or a person's name that I recognize. I haven't yet tried to recover or open them. There are a lot of other mp3 files without names (just given numbers). I don't remember if I had backed up my mp3 library to this drive or not, so these may or may not be mp3 files that I had anything to do with. With one exception, the largest file of any kind that the scan turned up was 1.82 GB (one of the recovered deleted videos, I think). THis tells me that most or all of my desired video files are not listed, since I would certainly have many that exceeded 5 GB, and a few that exceeded 10. The one exceptionally large file is the $BadClus file, which is 932 GB (very possibly the amount of space I'd filled on the drive when it broke). This file was created and modified on 3/13/2014, which was most likely the date on which the computer store had initialized the drive. This makes me wonder (and hope) whether, if I were to recover the $BadClus file to another external drive, it might magically reveal all the currently missing videos, etc. or, if it's possible but not that simple, what additional steps I might need to take to recover them. It just seems odd that files I deleted would be fine and unharmed, while ones I did not delete would be lost forever. Thanks very much for any help!