Recovery Possible ?

Recuva
1

My boyfriend borrowed my portable harddrive to back-up some files from his laptop, both Linux and Windows files. He finished, unplugged the drive and plugged it back into my PC and it now shows as completley empty.

He checked it under Linux and Windows, and both recognize the drive, but say that it has 500GB available and show nothing on there. It's a 500GB drive...(Linux showed a HD Folder and a recycling bin. The recycling bin had a System Volume File in it, nothing else, the other folder was empty)

We are currently running recuva, hoping for the best, as I have just lost photos, important documents and business email back-ups, but it is taking ages ! It has done 25% so far, doesn't yet show any files found and says it has another 18hrs to go. Is it worth letting it finish or have these files gone into file-heaven ? The drive was about 20% used, possibly slightly more after his back-up of the Laptop.

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate and the HD was formatted in NTFS. It is a Maxtor External USB Drive

2

37% done now - 12 hours to go.....

still no files showing though. I hope I am getting these back. At least the important ones. I am not too fussed about the videos and the music files.

3

Are you running a deep scan? Whether or not I would chop your current run and start with a normal scan with the Scan for Non-Deleted Files option chosen.

4

yes, running a deep scan. We never deleted many files on that drive, it was always for back-up - will the deep scan find those files as well ?

5

I'm wondering if the Master Boot Record has been corrupted on that hard drive.

You could try downloading a small utility called "Roadkil's Boot Build". It's a simple exe file which will read the MBR of a hard drive.

It can also write a new MBR if this is indeed the problem.

Roadkil's Boot Build: (Freeware)

Roadkil Forum:

This is what it looks like.

Read From Disk:

NUwrPs.jpg

Select Hard Drive:

gTT4Ps.jpg

The Result:

vXSScs.jpg

Create New NTSF BootSector:

aaSR4s.jpg

This may not fix the problem, but from the position that you're in, it's got to be something worth trying if you don't get any other suggestions.

Hope this helps.

6

cheers for that - I will keep it in mind if the deep scan will not find anything. I am not too worried yet, as the HD was not very full. I'll worry if it gets to 80% and not find any files...

then I will try other options. Just don't want to stop it yet, and then have to start it all over again - it's taking ages.

really appreciate your help though and I would love to know what happened. I just don't understand it. It was fine one minute, the next, it's lost everything...

7

Normal and Deep Scan will be looking for deleted files - I think there's a flag in the file header that show's that it's deleted. As you aren't looking for deleted files then I should tick the Non-Deleted option as I indicated above. It will be fairly fast as well (with Normal Scan). You are not doing any harm to the files on the disk at the moment so you can try a few non-invasive attempts at recovery. Good luck, I'm off to bed.

8

ok, to be honest, I am off to bed as well, so might as well let it run and see what it finds by the morning.

If that doesn't find anything will try the other scans and the other thingie - I can't afford to pay anyone to recover, but a friend of mine works in IT for a bank - if all else fails, I see if he can get it recovered at work

9

got impatient and cancelled the scan - oops, silly me. It has found loads of files and it was the files we were after, so it looks like they may have been deleted ? How ? Why ?

It found the files under F:\?\disk1

that is very weird, as they should have been under F:\[our names]

what does it mean ? There are log files, boot files and system volume files in there as well.

10
I'm wondering if the Master Boot Record has been corrupted on that hard drive.

You could try downloading a small utility called "Roadkil's Boot Build". It's a simple exe file which will read the MBR of a hard drive.

It can also write a new MBR if this is indeed the problem.

Roadkil's Boot Build: (Freeware)

Nice link Dennis.

I had a problem once when repartitioning, and I managed to leave the boot record in an inconsistent state. Lost all visibility of the partition but I knew the data was intact.

I ended up repairing it with TestDisk, but this utility looks simpler to use.

Having sorted out the boot record everything was fine and it looked like new.