2TB Hitachi external drive not showing folders

Al Chuaz

Honorable
Dec 21, 2013
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10,510
Yesterday I disconnected my external drive to do something, and when I reconnected later on I heard the drive power up and saw the light come on, but the prompt asking me how I wanted to open it did not start. When I checked My Computer the drive was not named the usual "Hitachi" but "Local Disk (E:)" and when I opened it, none of my folders were there, it appeared blank. I clicked on Properties, and it showed that I still had 268GB of used space on it, so presumably the data is still there?

I am no computer whiz, but per what was suggested in some other threads, I went to Control Panel, Appearance and Themes, Folder Options, View, and made sure "Show hidden files and folders" was checked. I then opened Command Prompt and tried to check the external drive's directory, and saw the following:

C:\Documents and Settings\Chuaz>e:

E:\>dir
Volume in drive E has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 1AFC-2847

Directory of E:\

12/21/2013 12:41 AM <DIR> System Volume Information
The parameter is incorrect.
12/21/2013 12:41 AM 0 'Çσ
1 File(s) 0 bytes
1 Dir(s) 1,711,221,506,048 bytes free

E:\>


I also tried another suggestion in Command Prompt and saw the following:

C:\Documents and Settings\Chuaz>attrib -h -r -s /s /d e:\*.*
Unable to change attribute - E:\'Çσ

C:\Documents and Settings\Chuaz>


I also tried the following Command Prompt:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Chuaz>e:

E:\>dir /ah
Volume in drive E has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 1AFC-2847

Directory of E:\

File Not Found

E:\>


I tried chkdsk in Command Prompt saw the following:

C:\Documents and Settings\Chuaz>e:

E:\>chkdsk
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume Serial Number is 1AFC-2847
Windows is verifying files and folders...
Windows found errors on the disk, but will not fix them
because disk checking was run without the /F (fix) parameter.
\'Çσ first allocation unit is not valid. The entry will be truncated.
Removing trailing folder entries from \
File and folder verification is complete.


I'm at a loss here! Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas on what I can do? Or even what went wrong? Thank you to whomever can help me!
 
Solution
It sounds like you unplugged the drive without 'ejecting' it properly first and corrupted the partition. Try recovering the partition. There are many free tools for this. I use testdisk but its not the easiest to your first venture into data recovery. Find and mount might be for you: http://findandmount.com/

In reality though this should not be a big deal, reformat and reload the drive. You should never trust a single drive to hold your only copy of important files. External drives should only be used to transport files or for backing up files. Because they can be dropped, not connected or disconnected properly, moved while the platters are still spinning or the heads not parked, accidentally formatted by another system... they are at...
It sounds like you unplugged the drive without 'ejecting' it properly first and corrupted the partition. Try recovering the partition. There are many free tools for this. I use testdisk but its not the easiest to your first venture into data recovery. Find and mount might be for you: http://findandmount.com/

In reality though this should not be a big deal, reformat and reload the drive. You should never trust a single drive to hold your only copy of important files. External drives should only be used to transport files or for backing up files. Because they can be dropped, not connected or disconnected properly, moved while the platters are still spinning or the heads not parked, accidentally formatted by another system... they are at extra risk of being damaged.
 
Solution
Thanks for the reply, Popatim. If I use the partition recovery software, is there a risk of it deleting or overwriting my data? Guilty as charged, I let backing up my files to DVD go for a while, and now I have data (mostly pictures) on the disk that is only there.
 
Hi, Popatim. I just tried the "Find and Mount" software, but unfortunately it didn't solve my problem. 🙁

When I try to scan my Hitachi drive with it, after a second or two a "Windows - Drive Not Ready" error message appear. It says the following:

"Exception Processing Message c00000a3 Parameters 75b6bf7c 4 75b6bf7c 75b6bf7c"

and has the option to Cancel, Try Again, or Continue.

If I hit Try Again, the same message keeps popping back up. If I hit Continue, within a couple of seconds it shows the following:

Visible Partions: Partition1
Size: 2000GB
File System: FAT32
System Disk: F:
(I have a different drive in the E: position right now)

When I mount this partition as Drive X: and open it, I see the same thing as I saw before on my damaged drive, which is:
a file named 'Çσ

and a folder called System Volume Information

inside that a folder named _restore{129201FA-B0AC-49B3-96B2-DEB8B91E727B}

inside that a folder named RP2690

inside that a text document named change.log

But none of my previous files and folders that I'm trying to rescue.
 
I was able to make the "Windows - Drive Not Ready" error message stop popping up when I scan with Find and Mount by going into my Control Panel and disabling floppy disk drive per a remedy I found elsewhere. But I'm still not able to find more than the single FAT32 partition or see any data on the drive. 🙁
 
So here's where I'm at now. After running the Intelligent Scan and Normal Scan from "Find and Mount" with no results, I selected deep scan and it said it would would take 21 hours. I let it run overnight, but when I checked the next morning it said it ran out of memory and failed. I saw two small FAT16 tables had also been found. When I mounted them, they each had the same few dozen unrecoverable files, and two recoverable jpegs.

I then tried using Recuva from Piriform. I found about 600 jpegs, it had them all renamed simply as a number, and not in their folders. It also wanted me to manually select each individual file I wanted to recover with a check mark.

I then kept reading where other people said they ran Error Check from Windows and they got their drive back, so I ran that with "automatically fix file systems" selected. Ten minutes later it said Disk Check Complete. I checked my drive, and still blank!

I opened Command Prompt and ran chkdsk, but now it says there are no problems.
Also from Command Prompt, I entered "attrib -h -r -s /s /d f:\*.*" again, and went to look at my drive. It now has a folder named "FOUND.000" with a bunch of files in it ending in chkdsk. I copied a few to my C drive and changed the extension to .jpg, and that's what they are. But still no original names, no folder structure, and they are only a small fraction of my files. The bulk of my files are still missing, in any case.

Any ideas on where to go from here?
 
To me it sounds like the files were compressed or encrypted by some kind of backup software or placed into an encrypted file. How exactly were you putting files onto the drive and which exact model external drive is it?( not the model # of the drive that was inside the external unit)
 
Hi, Popatim. I had just dragged and dropped folders onto it from C drive as my C drive got crowded, then I deleted them off my C drive. It is a Hitachi XL2000 (that's what it says on the case). On hardware properties my computer calls it Hitachi HDS723020BLA642 USB Device.
 
no how biog is that file on the external:
a file named 'Çσ

also in recovering files you dont care about the folder, you want the files. You said recuva found 600 jpgs. You should have recovered them.

Also you should never let anything write/make changes to a disk you are trying to recover from. Letting windows fix things was a mistake.

I fear for your files. Can recuva see anything now?
 
Oh, I had many thousands of pictures. 600 is just a drop in the bucket. 🙁 It showed that it had found those within the first several minutes of running the program, but over the hours it didn't find more. I started Recuva again like you said, and it says it will run through tonight till some time tomorrow afternoon. I don't know, we'll see. Any other ideas in the event it doesn't work?
 
Ok, Recuva did its thing. It didn't return any results. I got the "failed to recover the following drives, ran out of memory" message (I mistakenly said I got that on Find and Mount previously). I have 3.62GB of RAM, which I think is a pretty good bit, so it must be that Recuva simply wasn't designed for handling large hard drives. 🙁
 
Hey, Popatim. I tried GetDataBack (I read some people saying it retrieved their folder structure, too) and it said it'd take 22-23 hours to scan. Last I checked it was 98% done, but when I came back later it said it ran out of memory, too. So I doubled my virtual memory, and am going to try it again.