Recovering files with chkdsk

[poeticjustic]

hello to everyone,

i recently had a problem on one of my usb hard drives (d: 3TB) and some files and folders were corrupted-unreadable.
the hard disk had around 2TB of data (43000 files) and 700GB free.

i run chkdsk d: /f /r from a command prompt, and after it finished (it got me back to the command prompt).
it had said something about bad clusters etc etc.
So i went back to d: drive and from my computer the drive now it was showing it had 2.7TB of data and just 20GB free, so i imagined that it had recovered all of that corrupted data.

When i entered d: though i didn't find any recovered files, the structure was like it was before, some video files that didn't play at all or played with errors on the image before were still there and were still having problems, and when i selected all the files and folders and right clicked to show properties, the data was just 2 TB, like before (i have already selected to show all folders and system files etc etc, from folder options).
So where is all that recoverable data, which is probably that 0.7 TB difference i see. and how do i get back that 0.7 TB space?

I would appreciate your help.
thank you

 

[phil22]

Chkdsk can only "attempt" to recover corrupt data from bad clusters, it can't guarantee that any of the data will be any good (in fact I've never had any useable data recovered by chkdsk, and that's the usual outcome).

The lost capacity will be due to clusters being marked as bad an unusable, and this number will gradually increase. It's time to replace the drive before it fails completely.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

You should never actually see bad clusters on a modern hard drive. The drives are manufactured with a number of clusters held in reserve. These spare clusters are used by the on board controller to automatically (and invisibly) map out bad clusters as they appear. If chkdsk is actually reporting bad clusters it means that that the table of spares has become full and the controller can no longer map them out. At this point you need to back up your data and replace the drive. Do not hesitate, things will only get worse.

 

[poeticjustic]

@phil22 and ex_bubblehead
thank you both for the reply and your help.
At first i thought it was a hardware problem as well,
BUT, there is something weird going on that i haven't seen before and i'm a bit confused.
Whenever a drive starts going bad most of the time i could also see it in SMART,
and more importantly, the files started to get unreadable, i mean if you try and copy them you get stuck.
Here this is not the case though!!! I stumbled upon some files that have a problem and if i try to copy them they get copied just fine, but they are still messed up.

So for example i have an mp3 file, that now if i play it, it shows video scenes from many other videos i remember i had in the drive, and the scenes are all messed up. with no order or anything. And that is an MP3 file!!!! how on earth did that happen???
I have a movie file, that when you open it, it shows many different scenes all messed up (i think from the same movie, i haven't seen it, so i don't know for sure) without sound, it's just like when you download a video file and halfway through you can try and play it with vlc and it will show some scenes and images that are already in the file (wmplayer won't be able to open it, but vlc can).
And another video file that just doesn't open at all (not even with vlc) but i can still copy-paste it, or delete it just fine (of course wherever i paste it, still it doesn't play).
So it's like the content of the file is damaged or messed up somehow, but the hardware side of the disk is not. Can this be?

That is what makes it so difficult for me to check which files have the errors (and try to find them again) and which files are good.
Because if i start copying the whole drive it won't stuck whenever there is a messed up file. So i have to check the files one by one (which is crazy for this number of files).

I wish i could have an image of the report that chkdsk gave me, to show to you, maybe you could make something out of it. but i closed the command prompt window after it finished
Is there any way i can get that (the report-results from chkdsk)? i still haven't closed the laptop since then, only the command window.