I was unable to delete a file in Windows 10 yesterday so I tried a few things at a command prompt including rmdir. Somehow it deleted half the folders in an entirely different directory... well over 1,000 files that I'd spent the better part of a week working on.
It's an external drive only used for storage - no programs on it or accessing it, and except for a handful of files Recuva said they were all recoverable. So I ran it and got about 100 of them back (I restored from the external D: drive to a folder on the C: drive), but the rest got a drive not ready error. So I ran it again and this time had Windows Explorer open so I could click the external drive every minute or two (for six hours) so it wouldn't go to sleep. It worked! And all the files were recovered.
I notice, however, that about 100 of them have 0KB file size, and at least another 100-200 have a file size much smaller than it should be. Even worse than that, however, is that all of the files seem to be unreadable... video files can't play the file because it's unsupported, incorrect extension, or is corrupt (for media files); graphic files open to a blank screen; PDF files just say We can't open this file, something went wrong.
So nothing has been saved or work done on the external drive other than viewing it in Explorer, the files say they recovered, but something is wrong with them all.
I'll keep looking for answers, but any input is appreciated; I have one week to finish writing a book and having this taken care of would be a great help! Thank you.
