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Is drive corrupted / dying?
This morning I had a power failure and I dont have a UPS.
OS is Win98SE On reboot, I found that a bunch of files and folders had disappeared from my D drive (20Gb Maxtor) including my email message store, phones books etc. and 10Gb of stored photos. The drive seems to be working fine now, but explorer shows it as having 670mb of used space only and 19+Gb free. Any suggestions as to what might have happened, and is there anything I can do to retrieve the missing data? Is this drive on the way out or does the problem lie elsewhere? TIA Nick. |
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On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 13:44:04 +0100, "Nick" wrote:
This morning I had a power failure and I dont have a UPS. OS is Win98SE On reboot, I found that a bunch of files and folders had disappeared from my D drive (20Gb Maxtor) including my email message store, phones books etc. and 10Gb of stored photos. The drive seems to be working fine now, but explorer shows it as having 670mb of used space only and 19+Gb free. Any suggestions as to what might have happened, and is there anything I can do to retrieve the missing data? Is this drive on the way out or does the problem lie elsewhere? TIA Nick. Was the entire drive a single partition or all these missing files on the same partition as the 670MB of data that's still accessible? I suspect you have a corrupted FAT table. There are several recovery softwares that might copy off the missing data to a second drive, but if you (or the OS/Apps/etc) has written anything to the drive (as I'm sure happened at least after you opened and closed your email client) then there may be at least a few files lost or corrupted. I know that Ontrack's EasyRecovery will do this (recovery without writing to that drive), but I don't know if there are any good free programs. Of course this means you need another drive, not necessarily empty but it must have that much free space on it. You might also find that simply doing a scandisk (or if you have Norton Utilities, their Disk Doctor app) could recover the files, but since these programs change data on the drive holding the data to be recovered, they should be avoided except as a last resort. Of course if the data is valuable you should never run them, instead contacting a data recovery service first. Dave |
#3
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"kony" wrote in message ... On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 13:44:04 +0100, "Nick" wrote: This morning I had a power failure and I dont have a UPS. OS is Win98SE On reboot, I found that a bunch of files and folders had disappeared from my D drive (20Gb Maxtor) including my email message store, phones books etc. and 10Gb of stored photos. The drive seems to be working fine now, but explorer shows it as having 670mb of used space only and 19+Gb free. Any suggestions as to what might have happened, and is there anything I can do to retrieve the missing data? Is this drive on the way out or does the problem lie elsewhere? TIA Nick. Was the entire drive a single partition or all these missing files on the same partition as the 670MB of data that's still accessible? I suspect you have a corrupted FAT table. There are several recovery softwares that might copy off the missing data to a second drive, but if you (or the OS/Apps/etc) has written anything to the drive (as I'm sure happened at least after you opened and closed your email client) then there may be at least a few files lost or corrupted. I know that Ontrack's EasyRecovery will do this (recovery without writing to that drive), but I don't know if there are any good free programs. Of course this means you need another drive, not necessarily empty but it must have that much free space on it. You might also find that simply doing a scandisk (or if you have Norton Utilities, their Disk Doctor app) could recover the files, but since these programs change data on the drive holding the data to be recovered, they should be avoided except as a last resort. Of course if the data is valuable you should never run them, instead contacting a data recovery service first. Dave Thanks for that Dave, entire drive is a single partition. Fortunately I did a full backup a while back so I think I have only lost a couple of weeks data which isn't the end of the world. I must get into a routine of regular backups, today has perhaps been a good warning! I ran Norton Disk Doctor which reported and fixed an error with the free space. Other than that no faults at all. Thanks again Nick. |
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