[Mr. Jack]

I am getting extremely desperate here.

I reformatted my local hard drive last week. I backed up all my files on my external Acomdata 500 Gb hard drive. I really wish I didn't because right after I did, BEFORE i had the chance to transfer my files, somehow all of them got corrupted. It started out in 1 folder. I tried to open it, and it gave me a prompt that asked if I wanted to format the drive. Of course my heart took a huge leap since I wasn't at my house, I was at school working on a video project. Then i tried to run some other files in another folder, and it said that it couldn't open.

So I freaked out and tried to copy some important pictures and such. It gave me a Cyclic Redundancy Check error. So i wait to get home and I IMMEDIATELY run a TuneUp Utilities 2009 Disk Doctor program to check it for me. It froze up, so I closed it out and ran ChkDsk. I went to sleep, only to wake up to an error message. SO I tried it again, and it froze up at 25%.

SO i started installing tons of data recovery programs in a frantic hurry so I could do my project that was due the next day. I came across Spinrite 6.0, and I burned it to a cd and booted it on my next restart. It didn't get all the way through and gave me a Division Overflow Error.

I am really scared that I will lose these files. They are everything that I have created, made, or worked on in the past year. If I don't get my files back, I fail my course, I lose my priceless pictures, videos , and music. I am extremely desperate and right now im just attempting everything on my spare computer.

Please please please please give me some advice. Thank you very much.


UPDATE:

When I run a corrupted video file (the most important kind on the drive) it will play all of the uncorrupted parts, but when it hits a bad spot it lock up my entire computer until I unplug the drive.

Edited by Mr. Jack, 18 February 2009 - 09:49 PM.

[Advertisements]

is the drive thats causing the problem the external drive or your internal drive...

[happyrock]

is the drive thats causing the problem the external drive or your internal drive...

[Mr. Jack]

External drive.

Acomdata 500gb Fat32

[happyrock]

If I am understanding the problem correctly...you copied all your files to the external drive...then you wiped the internal drive and reinstalled windows and now you can't read your data on the external drive...is this right

[Mr. Jack]

Yes.

But it has not affected my internal drive at all, only my external one.

Edited by Mr. Jack, 19 February 2009 - 08:25 PM.

[happyrock]

you could have removed the internal drive and slaved it to a working system...installed the recovery software to the working system...and got back some, if not all of your data...this may still be possible to a degree...the problem got worse when you started installing things on the internal drive...windows was quite probably overwriting some of your data ....

SO i started installing tons of data recovery programs in a frantic hurry

you have a few options now....
first... create an image of the internal drive with disk imaging software to another hard drive.... slave that drive to your system and then
you could then install a data recovery program to your internal drive and see what you get back...
or take the cloned drive to a professional and have them recover what data they can...the latter, probably your best option

as for the external drive...
I would remove it from its enclosure ... slave it to a working system and try spinrite again...then data recovery programs while its slaved to the working system...odds are not good on the external drive

[Mr. Jack]

Did I mention the External drive is a USB 2.0 drive?

As far as I know I can't slave a USB drive.

[happyrock]

inside the external usb enclosure is a regular drive...you have to open the case up is all

Edited by happyrock, 20 February 2009 - 12:15 PM.

[Mr. Jack]

Okay so I took it out of its enclosure, and it has a Serial ATA plugs and luckily so oes my internal drive. So I took out my internal drive and I replaced it with the external one and ran spinrite. It gave me an error that said: "YOUR DRIVE IS IN IMMINENT DANGER OF FAILING" So I turned off the comp and put it back the way it was.

Did I F something up? What do i do?

EDIT:

Put it back together, still works with the USB.

Edited by Mr. Jack, 20 February 2009 - 11:05 PM.

[PedroDaGR8]

Okay so I took it out of its enclosure, and it has a Serial ATA plugs and luckily so oes my internal drive. So I took out my internal drive and I replaced it with the external one and ran spinrite. It gave me an error that said: "YOUR DRIVE IS IN IMMINENT DANGER OF FAILING" So I turned off the comp and put it back the way it was.

Did I F something up? What do i do?

EDIT:

Put it back together, still works with the USB.

That is a SMART warning. SMART monitors the drive for signs of failure. Since we already know your drive is failing, that warning is unsurprising and is nothing to worry about.

Put it back in the computer and just ignore that warning.

[happyrock]

even though you formatted and installed windows...your internal drive may still have some of your data that you can salvage...but you really need to stop using your system....

About Data Recovery

When it comes to data recovery there are a lot of myths out there. People are recommending Scandisk or some 10 year old DOS utility as the most sophisticated data recovery tools.

most of what you hear about data recovery is not true

"Gone is gone!"

In most cases this just isn't the fact... Whatever happened to your data - whether files were accidentally deleted, a virus has wiped out the boot record, the drive was formatted or fdisk'ed or even if it is no longer recognized by the operating system, as long as it wasn't physically overwritten, the data which was on the drive is still there.

The files just aren't accessible anymore the way they should be. For example, if you delete a file, the file's data is not deleted from the drive, but instead a signature byte is set at the start of the file's file name. This signature byte tells the operating systems that this area can be overwritten by other data next. And that's exactly what happens. The next time you write something to the drive, the new data will be written to the so marked area. But this also means, that as long as nothing new is written to the drive, the data is still there, intact and can therefore be recovered.

This behavior is also the reason why trying to undelete single deleted files often isn't successful. When you delete a file -and you empty the recycle bin as well- as soon as you notice that you still need the file, chances are that you have done something in the meantime, that has overwritten the data area of the file.

Even in cases which seem the most radical - when you ie: have formatted your drive from FAT32 to NTFS- and five minutes later realize that you didn't mean to format THIS drive, all of your files are still there. When you format a FAT32 drive, everything is destroyed (the boot record, the FAT, the root directory) except for the partition table and the data. And that's all you need! As long as the data's still there your files can be reconstructed - very often nearly perfectly.
"Installing this one program will not hurt..."

Yes it will...Never install or copy anything to the drive you want to recover data from.

this is why I advised you to clone your internal drive...then hook that drive to a different system that has the recovery software installed and see what you can get back...
you could even clone the dying external drive to a new drive ( before it quits completely) and see what you can recover from it....

They are everything that I have created, made, or worked on in the past year. If I don't get my files back, I fail my course, I lose my priceless pictures, videos , and music.

this may be beyond your abilities...so getting a professional will cost some money...but you have to ask yourself...how much is it going to cost to repeat the year..

[Mr. Jack]

Alright so I plugged it in and ran sprinrite. I got this error (image in the attachment)

Which happens to be the same one I got before. The only difference it seems is that it went faster.

Did I also mention that the only files that are corrupted are the ones that are fragmented?

I ran a Ultimate Defrag on it and nothing seemed to work. But now, all the sudden, I can't even analyze it. It says there are corrupt files on I:



I get the feeling that I am screwed. And more ideas?

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[happyrock]

Unfortunately, running CHKDSK on a damaged drive often makes the situation worse. Because the app reads and writes information to the drive attempting to correct errors, it will potentially move around pieces of information linked to damage sectors on the drive....the same is true of defragging the drive...
I'd bet money now that the external drive is toast...probably not ever going to get data off it...
my advice to you is ...remove your internal hard drive and take it to a shop that specializes in data recovery...if you continue doing things you will remove any chance of getting any data back

Edited by happyrock, 21 February 2009 - 06:21 PM.

[Mr. Jack]

That's what I was thinking.

So even if I cant get data off it, I can still format it again and start over right? Or am I going to have to buy a new one?

[happyrock]

are you talking about the internal drive or the external drive...
whichever one spinrite was giving you the errors is dead...