# Solved: USB Drive corrupted after chkdsk?



## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

I have a usb external case that I have an older 300gb Maxtor drive in. I am using it to work on a family photo album project so all that is on it is about 150gb of photos.

Last night it gave me some corrupt file errors so I ran checkdisk and after a reboot it ran and deleted the corrupt photos (no biggie, I have lots of copies) and I got back to work fairly quickly.

I also did a lot of deleting and moving of files yesterday, which I blamed for the corrupt ones, so I defragged the drive, it really needed it. It took several hours, but afterward I got into the files and looked at a few before shutting down for the night, all was well.

Today I looked at a few photos I had already modified then started trying to work on more pictures and my Paint Shop Pro would not open a folder due to one named corrupt file. I tried to delete that one file and copy a new version over it, but it would not let me. So I ran check disk again with both boxes checked, automatically fix system errors and scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. It made me reboot to let it run.

It ran for 4 hours! First it said the volume was dirty (not the first time I have seen that, but it goes away) then it deleted the one corrupt file, then it went on forever checking integrity files and free space (I did not know I was to be tested on this later so I don't remember exactly what it said).

Now the drive has lost its custom name that I gave it, although it kept the "H" moniker, it says the file system is RAW instead of NTFS and there is zero free space and zero used space. I cannot access the drive because "the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"! 



















Here is the only event log I could associate with it









I tried to run Ckdsk from the command prompt, but it just tells me H: is inaccessable. If I try to run it from the H: drive properties/tools nothing happens at all.

I tried PCinspector file recovery, it finds nothing. I took it out of the case and put it right in the computer, no change. I hooked it up to my Vista machine, no change.

The real bummer is I have modified about 2000 photos (out of 6000+) in the last 2 days running a batch file to put a custom frame on them, that required more than a little bit of hand sorting for the various shapes of photos, and have not put them to a backup disk. The originals are safe, but 2 days work is down the drain if I can't get back in here! 

I was wondering before I go doing something stupid if there is a way to put the file system back to NTFS without data loss? Would that even help? Is it gone already? The drive just may be dead, it is 3 years old, but I have never had one die yet and have some much older. It was working fine all week, just yesterday got these errors and it was all still there until I ran check disk this morning. It appears to have formatted the drive with the amount of time it took and the stunning results.

Any suggestions??

I am running winXP SP3, Dell Dimension 8400, 2gb ram.


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

Spent the rest of yesterday looking up "NTFS now RAW" and found this is a major problem for a lot of people going back to at least 2004. Lots of questions but not many answers. Lots of suggestions that didn't work for that particular person and not just a little bad looking advice.

I tried several "try before you buy" programs to see if the data is still on the drive and was relieved to find it is. 

"Recover My Files" found them and let me look at a preview, but wanted $49 to see if it would really restore them.

"Zero Assumption Recovery" found them, but said most were corrupted and said most pictures failed in the 4 folder restore it allows (before shelling out $40 for it). Funny thing is all the files copied to a new folder on another drive perfectly, so it was in error saying the recovery failed.

Another free product I found with a good review was TestDisk, but it is a DOS command interface with a lot of detailed options and it looked a little daunting late last night. I was going to try it today if all else failed. The part that makes it hard is the bad H: drive and my C: drive are both the same brand, model and size and it does not list them as C or H so it is hard for me to figure out which one I would be overwriting the MBR on (which is corrupt, causing the drive to be unreadable) and I just didn't want to go there if I did not have to. From some reading I know I can look at the sectors/LBA and the like to figure it out, but then I have to read more and I am tired of reading right now. My eyeballs hurt.

At this point I am trying "PC Inspector File Recovery" again since it is free. I couldn't find the drive with it yesterday, but today it did and showed the wayward folders. I am waiting for it to finish so I can see if it really works before having to spend $40+ for another program.

Funny thing is I had named this drive "NAS" and it gave it the H: designation, and PC Inspector finds both a NAS _and _an H: drive. Like they are 2 different things. It found no files when I looked at H yesterday, which is all Windows Explorer calls it. Today in PCI , when I finally noticed in the line of drives an entry for NAS, I scanned it and that is where it saw the files.

Hope it works! Only 109 minutes left to wait.


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

The best tool for restoring an NTFS partition is Testdisk. I just recently used it on a drive that had mistakenly been formatted FAT32 and it restored the drive and files like nothing at all had happened. It *can* achieve miracles under the right set of circumstances.

But as you may well suspect, the series of events you have described are all symptoms of a drive failing. If it is mechanically sound, there is still a chance of getting some files back. But it really doesn't look promising.

When you ran chkdsk with both options, did you notice if there were bad clusters?

Here's a few more to try:

Free:

Testdisk Documentation
Testdisk Download
DriveRescue
Testdisk Boot Disk
Partition Find & Mount
Free DTIData NTFS Partition Repair Tool

Commercial:

Diskinternals Partition Recovery (Demo)
[email protected] Partition Recovery
Bootmaster Partition Recovery
ZAR Partition Recovery
DIY DataRecovery DiskPatch
Partition Table Doctor

Free recovery applications:

Diskinternals Recovery Boot CD
Smart Data Recovery
Recover Files
Recuva
Restoration
Free Undelete (NTFS only)
Softperfect File Recovery
ADRC Data Recovery Tools
Undelete Plus
Data Recovery
PCI File Recovery
DriveRescue
Ultimate Data Recovery
Disk Investigator

Commercial:

O&O Disk Recovery
Paragon Mount Everything (Mounts any file system, CD/DVD burning, File Manager, Partitioner)
GetDataBack (For FAT or NTFS)
Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro
File Scavenger
Recover My Files
RecoverPlus Pro
Zero Assumption Recovery
[email protected] File Recovery
Final Recovery
Recover4All Professional
Easeus Data Recovery Wizard
NTFS Recovery


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

No bad clusters or sectors as I recall, just corrupt files. The drive is listed as "healthy" in disk management, I just cannot access it in a normal way. Somehow it got trashed when I ran checkdisk that last time. 

I think the enclosure I had it in was a cheap POS (with no fan) so I had ordered a new one with a fan from a reputable company that morning. Must have insulted it! For now it is mounted inside the computer.

I had no stand for it (as I said, cheap!) so I had it sitting on two aluminum tins for air circulation and always felt it to make sure it was not getting hot. I even taped a digital thermometer probe to it. A couple times it started to get hot after long hours of running so I would put an absorbant towel on it and lay a couple gel ice packs on it. Worked great, kept the temperature down quite nicely, but I knew I wanted a new enclosure before I killed it. Can you say "procrastinate"?

I still have a half hour to wait for PCInspector. I don't know how it can be finding 72000+ files when I had only about 7000+ on the disk, unless it is scanning the wrong one. If that does not work I will probably try TestDisk. I had already downloaded it last night. 

Thanks for the links.


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

Would checkdisk have put a temp log somewhere I can look at and see exactly what it found? I find my personal memory can be faulty at times, too!


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

Well, PCInspector failed miserably. It showed all the folders, but when it finally finished they were all basically empty. That was a huge waste of time (almost 3 hours) since in 20 minutes ZAR found them and I restored my 4 folder limit and they were intact.

I bit the bullet and tried TestDisk. I found the folders so I know I was in the right drive. It showed as a bootable partition when I got to the point that I was supposed to change it to a Logical, but that option was not available so I changed it to Primary (as per "If a partition is listed *(bootable) but if you don't boot from this partition, you can change it to Primary partition").

I followed the rest of the instructions and rebooted the computer and alas, no joy. Hard drive still corrupt and unreadable. 

I am hoping that writing the partition structure did not take any data with it. 

I am re running ZAR and if it finds the files again I may just bite the bullet and pay for it. I don't want to play with stuff till I really trash the drive!

It's always something.


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

I used ZAR up to recover all the files I needed to, it really is a great program (I tried a bunch of them and it found the most missing files). There are very few pictures missing, but the ones I really needed are there, a few that I had actually done repairs on and had not backed up that day (these are old photos from the 20's on). 

I just used the free "4 folders at a time" file recovery. It took a while, but I had a lot of other things to do yesterday so I just let it run, grabbed my 4 free folders then let it scan again while I went off and did other stuff. Had it still been $39.99 when I clicked purchase I would have just bought it, but they have "night rates" and at the time I went to purchase it was up to $49.99 and I had to wait 10 hours to get the "night rate". Just couldn't do it. That extra $10 could get me 2 gallons of gas!  They lost this sale (for now).

I am going to just reformat the drive and keep it in the main computer till the new enclosure arrives, I will keep using it until it does something really stupid and I know for sure it is the drive and not the enclosure that was the problem, but will make copies of my work every day this time! 

PS: The list of links to programs (above) has a lot of broken links. The bulk of them are also for just deleted files, not corrupted drives. I tried most of them.

On to the next disaster!

(That's why my computers are called ********, from the old story about Brier Rabbit and the ********. Every time I pokes it with a finger I end up with all 4 feet in there )


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

Be sure to repartition the drive before formatting or bad partition tables may bring you back where you started.


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

I deleted the partition, reformatted and am waiting for a thorough checkdisk to finish. File, Index, Security and data have all passed as well as the dirty volume warning is gone. It is checking free space now. 

I just leave it as one big drive, one partition. It was basically a place for me to work on the photos and stay off of and away from any other drive with the same photos backed up on them so I did not make a booboo and work on the wrong pictures. I have them on DVD's, too, but I don't trust them a whole lot. Then I have the master backup hard drive tucked away in the safe. The only thing I don't have is off site storage, which I will when I finish and distribute it to the family.


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

You may want to run chkdsk /r on that drive and look at the final report to see if there are bad clusters. If there are any at all, the drive may be dying and you should not trust it with data.

HD Tune will scan for bad clusters, too.


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

Checkdisk came out clean and everything looks good. I'll still just use it as a work space, but copy the files every time I finish this time. It's a fast little drive with nothing on it but the pictures so my work goes faster when I am doing graphics intensive stuff.


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

spotmom said:


> Checkdisk came out clean and everything looks good. I'll still just use it as a work space, but copy the files every time I finish this time. It's a fast little drive with nothing on it but the pictures so my work goes faster when I am doing graphics intensive stuff.


Sounds like a plan. I was just making sure that you didn't rely completely on that drive for saving precious files. It may be fine, but no drive should be trusted to keep important docs safe, even if brand new. We have horror stories all through this forum of people losing irreplaceable pictures and files.

So, I'm taking this opportunity to again remind people that data you want to keep needs to be backed up. And the very easiest and safest way to do that is to have some ability to make an image of your entire drive to an external (or second internal) so that everything, operating system, programs, files, can be restored to a new drive *when* the main one fails. They can die suddenly and unexpectedly.

So take the plunge and get Acronis, Terabyte, ShadowProtect, or the very good and free Macrium Reflect (Be sure to make the bootable recovery CD for restoring the images) and save yourself a world of hurt.

Free Drive Cloners/Imagers:

Macrium Reflect
Clonezilla (Bare-metal restoration from image)
Partimage
SystemRescueCD
EaseUs Disk Copy (Copies disks or partitions)
XXClone
CloneZilla GParted LiveCD (Complete partitioning and drive imaging/restoration tools)
Partition Saving
PCI CloneMaxx
Drive Image XML
HDClone
DriveClonerXP
Self-Image
copyr.dma (Copies disk with bad sectors for recovery)

Commercial Apps:

[email protected] Disk Image
O&O DiskImage
Acronis True Image Home
Farstone Drive Clone (Drive image, snapshots, file/folder backups.)
EAZ-FIX Professional and Easy Image
Drive Snapshot
ShadowProtect (Also online backups.)
Keriver Image
Avanquest Copy Commander
Paragon Drive Backup
NovaBackup
R-Drive Image
Norton Ghost
HDClone Pro or Enterprise
Terabyte Image for Windows
Terabyte Image for DOS (can directly access FAT, FAT32, and NTFS partitions)
Spotmau Disk Clone & Backup


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## spotmom (Apr 22, 2008)

Yeah, I have the latest Acronis, but have not done a complete drive image yet, just a few backups. I manually backup to a separate 1TB removeable hard drive and also to disks. 

Now I need something to do a folder compare to see which pictures went AWOL from each folder I restored. Looks like there are between 2 and 7 in each one looking at the number of files in each one. I don't want to have to compare photos manually, but I have done that in the past when I did not trust a copying job I did.


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

This looks promising:

http://www.diffdaff.com/

But it may be easiest just to get a program that searches for duplicates, only this time just to show you the ones that have dupes rather than searching to delete them. Most of those will comapre file contents, too, and not just names.

http://www.snapfiles.com/downloadfind.php?st=duplicate+finder&action=s&search=Find+it&lc=1


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