recover mising hard drive files

April 20, 2006 2:13 PM

my hard drives recently perfomed some weird format-like trick on me recently and i need to restore the data I've tried a couple of different 'repair' programs to no avail. help!

drive c = seagate 40gb ~35gb missing
drive d = maxtor 160gb ~150gb missing
win xp

it started when i was transferring alot of data from one drive to another and the computer crashed, restarted and system files were missing so i ran the xp recovery cd and every directory bar a few windows folders were gone. I ran chkdsk repair and it worked again, yeah!

so it happens again but this time chkdsk doesn't fix it so i run recovermyfiles then getdataback programs but both would only recover a few files with some other files in a 'lost files' directory which would make finding anything i needed pretty much impossible

this then happened on my other drive(i installed windows onto the drive) with the same results from the software

i now have a clean install of windows on a new hard drive and need some advice on any software to recover my files

(both drives seem to work fine, when attached to another pc, i can browse whats left of the directory and theres no clicking noises)

thanks for any help

posted by quantumonkey to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I've had pretty good luck with R-studio. Whatever you do, avoid anything that will write to the problem hard disks until you have recovered your data.
posted by Good Brain at 2:54 PM on April 20, 2006

BTW, you can start by using a demo version of R-studio, and see how many files it can recover before licensing it and actually going ahead with the recovery. Also, depending on how badly mangled the data structures are on the disks, you might not find anything resembling your old directory structure.
posted by Good Brain at 2:55 PM on April 20, 2006

Please remember, if you write anything onto these drives you're trashing your chances of recovering any more data. So you need to be writing those 'lost' files and recovered data onto a DIFFERENT HARD DRIVE, or else you're likely overwriting other data that you might othewise have had a chance to recover.

Put it this way, when the software recovers a file it does NOT just 'uncover' it in place. It makes a new copy of the file somewhere else on the drive. And whatever was there before might have been important too.

I second the vote for R-Studio, I've tried CIA and EasyRecovery and a bunch of others and R-Studio has been the best for me on a number of occassions.
posted by tiamat at 5:06 PM on April 20, 2006

As much as you say "these drives are working fine", they sound pretty much like they're dying to me. If you DO manage to recover the data, I would suggest no longer trusting these drives for anything critical.
posted by antifuse at 12:58 AM on April 21, 2006

I had a power failure while files were writing to a drive and used FileRecovery Pro and got back about 90% of my data with the proper names and directory structures. I reformated the drive and put the data back and the data would get corrupted about once a month (and I would have to re-recover it). I eventually replaced the drive.
posted by phirleh at 6:57 AM on April 21, 2006