Not certain if this is in the right section, if not, I apologize.
Anyone have a clue what might have happened to my USB drive?
I had sorted some 500 photographs I took in a wedding party on the drive. Some of them I had edited with Photoshop. I was about to give the drive on to the married couple when I decided to copy a handful of photos from my PC's SSD to the drive.
While copying, the drive suddenly showed multiple folder with names as if encrypted, like C=%,v_¤56:F and so on.
I ran Windows' check and fix -tool on the drive (chkdsk?) and it returned the drive back to normal visually. Except that every photo I had retouched (somewhat 50) were gone completely.
I downloaded and ran Disk Drill, which found a lot of files with the ending .CHK. I tried to recover them but the program froze after a short while. It also allowed only 500mb of recovery with the free version so I deleted it and moved on.
At this point I re-tried chkdsk, cause why not. I shouldn't have as the drive was converted to FAT32 by windows and now I can't access it at all with the file explorer.
I tried to convert it back to NTFS in command prompt, but i says "convert is not available for RAW drives". Never heard of those. Apparently for the same reason Recuva can't access the drive as the format is uknown to it.
I can see the drive with Minitools partition wizard, which also shows it has somewhat 29gbs of content. Around the amount it should have, I guess. It can scan it for recovery but it seems to take more than 3 hours and the free version might not support actual data recovery. I'll let it run during the night.
But I'm confused, what went wrong here? Bad drive that got corrupted?
Virus? Avast scanning got jammed at 2% and now with the drive in FAT32 format both Avast and Malwarebytes seem to consider the drive empty. Also seems kinda unlikely to me.
Also, what next?
Anyone have a clue what might have happened to my USB drive?
I had sorted some 500 photographs I took in a wedding party on the drive. Some of them I had edited with Photoshop. I was about to give the drive on to the married couple when I decided to copy a handful of photos from my PC's SSD to the drive.
While copying, the drive suddenly showed multiple folder with names as if encrypted, like C=%,v_¤56:F and so on.
I ran Windows' check and fix -tool on the drive (chkdsk?) and it returned the drive back to normal visually. Except that every photo I had retouched (somewhat 50) were gone completely.
I downloaded and ran Disk Drill, which found a lot of files with the ending .CHK. I tried to recover them but the program froze after a short while. It also allowed only 500mb of recovery with the free version so I deleted it and moved on.
At this point I re-tried chkdsk, cause why not. I shouldn't have as the drive was converted to FAT32 by windows and now I can't access it at all with the file explorer.
I tried to convert it back to NTFS in command prompt, but i says "convert is not available for RAW drives". Never heard of those. Apparently for the same reason Recuva can't access the drive as the format is uknown to it.
I can see the drive with Minitools partition wizard, which also shows it has somewhat 29gbs of content. Around the amount it should have, I guess. It can scan it for recovery but it seems to take more than 3 hours and the free version might not support actual data recovery. I'll let it run during the night.
But I'm confused, what went wrong here? Bad drive that got corrupted?
Virus? Avast scanning got jammed at 2% and now with the drive in FAT32 format both Avast and Malwarebytes seem to consider the drive empty. Also seems kinda unlikely to me.
Also, what next?