Question My External HDD is corrupted after pluging it into a TV for recording

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berbat88

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Apr 30, 2020
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Hello, i have recently plugged my External Harddrive to use the recording feature of my TV's receiver. Almost instantly after plugging the external HDD the receiver started changing the format of the Drive. I had important stuff in the drive and plugged it off directly after seeing that information message... Very unfortunately my files are already looking corrupt when i check them on windows as you can see in the image below. Had something similiar before but remember being able to save the drive totally. Now i don't want to lose any data and save them. What are the safest ways of doing it?

https://i.im.ge/2022/08/20/OIgGrS.Screenshot-2022-08-20-164212.png

https://im.ge/i/OI8Mg6
 

Ralston18

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Make and model External Harddrive?

Capacity shown as 1,75 TB but appears almost completely full. ( I prefer to limit my drives to 70-80% of capacity - that is just me.)

USB connection direct to TV - correct?

Make and model TV? What is the default file type for files recorded by the TV?

I believe that the starting point is to find the applicable TV User Guide/Manual and learn what defaults/options etc. are available when an external storage device is plugged in.

I would not expect that the TV would immediately start overwriting files, formatting, or making other changes to the External harddrive without some end user confirmation.

However, some manufacturer's just make all decisions for the end user in some simple brute force manner that is cheaper to code and implement.

Knowing more about both the hard drive and the TV may help find a solution.

Hopefully the data is backed up somewhere else and/or the original data is still available on the original host drive.
 

DSzymborski

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I'll be honest; I'm not sure there's any real hope of recovering files that are corrupted in a mysterious way unless you can find someone with the exact TV who had similar problems and figured something out. You can always try a data recovery firm, but unless it's a specific, known problem with this specific hardware, it is probably less likely to be successful than their normal recovery job and likely to be much more expensive.

It's unfortunate that there's important data here. It doesn't sound like you have backups, meaning that you didn't treat it as if it were important data. If you can't recover your files, or even if you can, I hope you use this as motivation to protect your data properly in the future with multiple, regular, automated backups.
 

berbat88

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Apr 30, 2020
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Sorry to all for the late response, i could only find the time to do so.

Make and model External Harddrive?

Capacity shown as 1,75 TB but appears almost completely full. ( I prefer to limit my drives to 70-80% of capacity - that is just me.)

USB connection direct to TV - correct?

Make and model TV? What is the default file type for files recorded by the TV?

I believe that the starting point is to find the applicable TV User Guide/Manual and learn what defaults/options etc. are available when an external storage device is plugged in.

I would not expect that the TV would immediately start overwriting files, formatting, or making other changes to the External harddrive without some end user confirmation.

However, some manufacturer's just make all decisions for the end user in some simple brute force manner that is cheaper to code and implement.

Knowing more about both the hard drive and the TV may help find a solution.

Hopefully the data is backed up somewhere else and/or the original data is still available on the original host drive.

TOSHIBA MQ01ABB200 2000,3 GB is the external drive i am using. It was as far as i remember around 70% its full capacity maybe lower, it shows wrong now since the data looks corrupted or just the index.

Direct to the receiver not the TV, sorry for the wrong information. Couldn't really find the make model of the receiver which is not a good one for sure. The file types are Fat32 as far as i am aware for recording on that device. Couldn't sadly find any manuals. The receiver indeed started the formatting right on without asking for confirmation.

Good news is that i did a quick format directly from windows to NTFS and now i can reach my data via programs like Recuva or DMDE, and they look all preserved somehow(not sure).

A 2TB HDD, that the TV started to reformat as FAT32.

Yeah, that "important data" is likely gone.

Looks like not, but just the indexes are.


Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

Don't write anything to your damaged drive.

First of all thanks for the program suggestion, i have never heard of that one before and it did show me all the files i had in my HDD right on, without doing anything but quick formatting to NTFS before

Now i am just looking for a way to completely restore the data without losing anything which feels completely possible to me after reaching to data properly via DMDE.
Currently, trying to use the DMDE app to recover the files, but it is asking me for a drive and folder to recover files to. I don't even know if i can pick the exact same disk to recover the files to, if not, i will be needing a disk that has around 1.5TB of empty space which looks like a small problem to deal with right now.

Any suggestions?
 
ALWAYS recover to a different drive, NEVER recover to the source (patient) drive.

Formatting the drive in Windows was a BAD idea. You have complicated things immensely. DMDE does not need to see a functional file system, nor does any data recovery software. In fact, if the drive had been an SSD, or an external HDD that supports TRIM (SCSI UNMAP), formatting would have completely wiped your data, ie the partition would have been filled with zeros.
 

berbat88

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Apr 30, 2020
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ALWAYS recover to a different drive, NEVER recover to the source (patient) drive.

Formatting the drive in Windows was a BAD idea. You have complicated things immensely. DMDE does not need to see a functional file system, nor does any data recovery software. In fact, if the drive had been an SSD, or an external HDD that supports TRIM (SCSI UNMAP), formatting would have completely wiped your data, ie the partition would have been filled with zeros.

I really don't know how bad was it to quick format the drive to change the file system but, Recuva was showing all the files it found in a corrupted way before that quick format. Which showed everything correct after that quick format. Maybe I have picked the wrong tool for the recovery process. Do you recommend DMDE?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I really don't know how bad was it to quick format the drive to change the file system but, Recuva was showing all the files it found in a corrupted way before that quick format. Which showed everything correct after that quick format. Maybe I have picked the wrong tool for the recovery process. Do you recommend DMDE?
Showing all the files it found is sort of like finding the Table of Contents for a book.

"Oh look...page 83 starts the blueprints for a cold fusion reactor."

Turn to page 83.....blank.
Or it recovers every 3rd page. The other two pages have gone through the shredder.

It only counts when the actual file resides in full, on a different drive.
 
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