I recently had a hard drive failure..well, I wouldn’t call it a failure on the hard drive’s part. I was copying my music folder from my hard drive to My Music folder on a new Windows installation. With about 15 seconds left to go, I start getting errors saying that all the files it was trying to copy were corrupt. Great! So I cancel out of that and remove my hard drive from the system via "safely remove hardware". I reconnect the HD to run the CheckDisk utility that I have come to hate so much in Windows (mainly because it starts more problems than it fixes). When I reconnect, the entire 150 GB partition is "corrupted and unreadable". I try to run the recovery command from the command prompt, which tells me that I need to run chkdsk.exe. Okay, so I run chkdsk, and it tells me that windows cannot determine the state of the drive and will abort.
Now, one would imagine that there would be plenty of information out there about this very issue, and there is, but most of it I can’t get to through our web filtering. I try to find software that may help fix it after looking through some forums and find a few that offer trial versions of their software. So I install a few programs, one that freezes as soon as it opens, another that doesn’t do anything unless you buy the full version, and another that makes you think it’s going to fix something but six hours later you find it telling you that it can’t help you.
This is frustrating, and I refuse to format the partition because I don’t want to lose over 100GB worth of data. So I kept looking for solutions to no avail. A friend let me use some software that he had called active-undelete. I may just buy this software ust in case this happens in the future. It’s not finished yet, but it has actually given me feedback on what it sees on the hard drive so far, and how much longer I can expect it to run. The recovered MFT records are now in the hundreds of thousands, so I think I might get everything back, we’ll hope so.
I hope this helps anyone with the same problem
Now, one would imagine that there would be plenty of information out there about this very issue, and there is, but most of it I can’t get to through our web filtering. I try to find software that may help fix it after looking through some forums and find a few that offer trial versions of their software. So I install a few programs, one that freezes as soon as it opens, another that doesn’t do anything unless you buy the full version, and another that makes you think it’s going to fix something but six hours later you find it telling you that it can’t help you.
This is frustrating, and I refuse to format the partition because I don’t want to lose over 100GB worth of data. So I kept looking for solutions to no avail. A friend let me use some software that he had called active-undelete. I may just buy this software ust in case this happens in the future. It’s not finished yet, but it has actually given me feedback on what it sees on the hard drive so far, and how much longer I can expect it to run. The recovered MFT records are now in the hundreds of thousands, so I think I might get everything back, we’ll hope so.
I hope this helps anyone with the same problem
Advertisement
