Hard Drive wipeout
June 1, 2009 5:57 PM   Subscribe

Hard drive recovery: my external USB hard drive is mounting fine on both my mac and PC, however, all the files are showing up as garbage characters.

It's also reporting that the drive is 95% full, when it definitely wasn't anywhere near that. I've already used Data Rescue II to get copies a few of my most important files, I'm just wondering if there is anything more I should try before I format the drive and start over. It seems like the index was corrupted, but there is nothing physically wrong with the drive.
posted by mike_bling to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)
 
run malwarebytes on it
posted by patnok at 7:26 PM on June 1, 2009


SpinRite.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 7:50 PM on June 1, 2009


did you run windows scandisk?
posted by defcom1 at 8:06 PM on June 1, 2009


Response by poster: malwarebytes seems to be antimalware, not for data recovery.

SpinRite isn't doing much for me because it doesn't have usb support and it's a SATA drive which I can't plug in.

Windows scandisk gets to the end of 'Phase 1' and then hangs. It says 'Checking Disk Æìj(Φ•DQ[' which is pretty representative of the rest of the bad filenames - garbage.
posted by mike_bling at 8:32 PM on June 3, 2009


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