bretsim

Thanks for the reply. The file itself was never marked as unrecoverable - Recuva just didn't pick it up as a non-deleted file, but at the same time it did recognise that it's existence rendered another file unrecoverable. ChkDsk was the saviour here. It returned the files to a "found.000" folder on the C drive, and at that point I finally had a path to access the data that had been there all along.

Hello, noob here. A laptop I thought was plugged in ran out of battery and switched off unexpectedly. Upon powering on again, I noticed a large (20gb) and important file had vanished (in Windows, the folder it was in was there on first boot, but gave an error when I tried to browse to it. On subsequent boots, the folder vanished completely too.) I ran Directory Snoop first of all - it didn't find the file, but when I searched by file size, it showed me a non-deleted file with the right name, size and creation/modification/access dates as my file. It had no path, so I couldn't do anything other than feel relieved that at least it wasn't totally gone. In WinDirStat, I could see a large file block of approximately the right size, but again was unable to browse to it. I tried Recuva next, with the non-deleted file option selected. It didn't find the file, but when I looked at a deleted file in the parent folder, Recuva gave the info that it was unrecoverable as it had been overwritten by the file I was looking for, with path c:\?\ So every utility I've used knows the file is there, but none is able to do anything at all with it. Any suggestions to recover this file? I want to try Checkdsk next, but I don't want to lose the tenuous grip I have on the file at the moment, where I can at least see it's there! Thanks for reading!