Hard Drive wipeout

June 1, 2009 5:57 PM

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 comments total)

run malwarebytes on it
posted by patnok at 7:26 PM on June 1

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

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

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