So, I was reading some stuff off of a drive in a USB enclosure, and I think windows had some sort of error. I got a little help balloon notifying me that there was a delayed write failure. I let it sit a bit hoping it would retry and finish the write but eventually I turned the drive off.
Now... I think the partition (NTFS) or the MFT got corrupted. I thought NTFS was supposed to be all great and cool right? But now I research a bit and there's no spec because it's proprietary. goddamn. now i understand why linux didn't easily support NTFS partitions when i was dabbling in it.
I plugged the drive back in.
I can't remember exactly what happened or what I did but there were problems. After plugging the drive directly into a desktop and rebooting / letting it autorun chdsk few times, windows now recognizes a drive is there, but won't tell me it's free space or total capacity.
What could I have done to prevent this (if possible)?
Can Ghost help me make a copy of the drive bit for bit?
What can I do to recover the files?
Can you recommend any software that may be able to solve my problem? There are way too many recovery/undelete programs and they all promise to do everything. Pay software are okay, but spending $49-$99 (or more??) sucks.
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Anonymous2007-09-12 4:54 ID:iitqMNiS
Try UnDelete. You may want to RMA the drive, so see if it's under manufacturer warranty. Don't use it for important data, if you manage to get it working again.
Name:
Anonymous2007-09-13 0:07 ID:i8/RZRiv
I'm going to try and ghost the drive so i have a "backup"..
Name:
Anonymous2007-09-13 3:03 ID:lxzfrIF8
lol ntfs
Name:
Anonymous2007-09-13 7:03 ID:MG+M/hs5
Shouldn't have turned off the external drive. Should have tried checking event viewer for more detailed info, followed by possibly running chkdisk on it while still connected. Finally, should have tried shutting down Windows for a clean unmount (assuming Windows wouldn't have frozen in the attempt).
Ghost doesn't do exact sector copies like dd. It works at the filesystem level only. You'd be lucky if Ghost worked.
You can pay someone to get your files off the drive. Amateur recovery is sometimes possible, but more often than not, such attempts are counter-productive by way of destructiveness. Never expect a pro recovery specialist to be able to recover a drive after you have tried and failed.
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Anonymous2007-09-13 8:18 ID:FnTR51ME
Luckily, this drive is 100% anime. Nothing critical.
Unluckily, this drive does not belong to me and i'm going to get my ear talked off about messing it up and losing half her collection.
I haven't touched the drive again yet actually, because I was researching what tools might be helpful and playing gunbound...
Name:
Anonymous2007-09-16 23:30 ID:6RgBNx+a
lol @ gunbound
anyways, try chkdsk as mentioned above. Or a GOOD file recovery program