Harddrive recovery

[Zensteve]

Okies, so I'm a dumbass.

I had one of my trusty external drives plugged in, and I wanted to clean it up a bit before starting work on my amazing, stupendous director reel.

Now, my usual system settings (winXP) is set to show hidden files & folders. See where I'm going here?

There was a hidden folder called "trashes".

In my usual clever fashion, I decided that this must be the harddrives "recycle bin", so I opened it and deleted all the contents. Opened up a lot of space, that's for sure.

At any rate, the next day when I went to use it, it was inoperable.

Every time I plug it in, Windows says "Hello, this drive is unformatted. Would you like to format now?".

I'd rather not do that yet, as there are some finished cuts of various films on it. I could always recut the bits I wanted to use from the original tapes, but that's a bit of a hassle. In my infinite wisdom, I even neglected to save copies of the EDL's onto a CD, so it would take a while.

I've looked into several data-recovery tools, but I can't see using them, as it would have to see the harddrive in order to access it.

Any ideas?

 

[Thunderclap]

Have you tried recovering the folder from the recycle bin?

 

[steve gelder]

Hey, Zen! I'm on a Mac, so some of the things I suggest may not apply, but, just to clarify - can you see the drive at all after startup of your computer? For instance, if you say "no" to the formatting question and that window closes, is there an icon for the drive there on the desktop?

If there is, can you maybe drag a startup folder or system folder onto the drive, restart the computer and see if you can then at least access the files on the drive? After you get copy all the files you want to save, I'd reformat the drive from scratch.

Good luck!

 

[Zensteve]

The deleted files are not in the Recycle Bin of my main C: drive.

Even if they were, I could not restore them to the external drive, as that is not recognised at all. Well, it is... but as an unformatted drive, and unreadable.

 

[Thunderclap]

This is very strange. Even if you delete "hidden" files/folders they shouldn't render the drive inoperable. Have you tried scanning the drive for viruses? What about a disk check to see if the drive has become corrupted somehow?

 

[Will Vincent]

I think "trashes" is a mac related thing.. Windows calls its recycle bin folder "Recycler" or something to that effect. So I would wager that you've at least at some point in time had this drive plugged into a mac machine.

That said, deleting the folder should not have rendered the drive unusable. My thought is that you probably have a corrupt file table.

There are tools available that should be able to recover your data if that's the case. My co-worker just said that he used Partition Table Doctor on one of our servers here at work a few months ago to recover a hosed partition.

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

Wow, I'd have to try replicating your problem to know how that could happen.

The simplest solution I can think of is to connect the drive to a Mac and rescue your files from there, if the Mac will mount the partition.

Another option is to use a Linux rescue CD, but that option requires an understanding of Linux device names, disk mounting, etc.