Hello, all...

I was using a thumb drive to move pictures from my laptop to the second hard drive in my tower. All was going well, and then I got messages saying that certain files on the hard drive were corrupted. Now I can't access anything on the hard drive, which has about 3 years of photos on it.

I have no idea what could have happened. I had already moved several gigs of pictures in the same manner with no problems. The C drive works fine.

I've seen a few companies advertising software to recover files from failed hard drives, I've had some people tell me that it will take professional help and big $$ to recover anything...

Any (and I mean ANY!!) help would be very much appreciated.

If the OS still sees the drive, try running chkdsk /f on it.

quote:

Originally posted by Smedley:
If the OS still sees the drive, try running chkdsk /f on it.

It DOES recognize that there's a drive there, but it doesn't allow access. I had it named so that it would be easy to find among all the other drives (it's external, so it would be moved from computer to computer) and all of a sudden, instead of the name it would be "K" drive on one machine, "F" on another, with no access allowed.

quote:

Originally posted by StarrToDowler:
[SNIP]
I've had some people tell me that it will take professional help and big $$ to recover anything...
[/SNIP]

I don't think the "Big $$" part is right. I took in a failed HD to a local repair place & they pulled off files for around $55. Good luck.

Do a google search on media recovery. There's a bunch of software out there to recover data. The following link is one of the sites you can find. They have a demo version that will show you what data can be recovered, but you'll need to buy the software to actually recover it.

http://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery.htm

or if it's really important to you, don't mess around with it and go with Ontrack

http://www.ontrack.com/


I've sent about 6 drives to them in the past few months for work and they've been able to recover 4 of them completely and 1 partially.

it's not cheap, but you could risk further damage to the drive and loss of data if you try to do it yourself, or by taking it to a local yokel.

I've got about 12 years of experience in the IT field just to let you know I'm not blowing smoke for you.

Just wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to all who responded. The advice worked, and I've got it all back!!

Run SLAX...it's a Unix based operating system that boots up on CD\DVD. You can map to another machine if you're on a network or a secondary drive if you have one and push the data to that drive. Reimage your current HD and you're golden.