Corrupt Hard Drive? Help! :(

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Calum Stewart

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Dec 3, 2013
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So I've had this 2TB hard drive for around 3 years now, and its worked perfectly ever since I bought it. I have all my data on it, movies, games etc. I ordered a new 3tb hard drive as the 2tb one was getting pretty full. The 3TB arrived today, so I installed it using the correct SATA and power cables. When I booted up my computer the 3TB drive worked fine, but the 2TB one didnt seem to be working. The computer still recognised it, but all the folders were renamed to a bunch of weird symbols, and most of the folders were green. It wouldnt let me open any folders or files on the drive.

I tried error checking with windows, it stayed at 0% for about an hour then said windows cannot repair this drive...

After that all the folders had gone and the drive appeared to be empty (shown in the picture) Also it tells me in drive properties that the drive only has 29GB capacity with 43mb left. Whereas in disk management it still shows the drive as having 1800GB.

There were power cuts last night that I think could have possibly caused this, I dont see how simply installing a new drive could corrupt the old one. The computer wasnt on last night but the power went on and off multiple times throughout the night. Every other electronic device in the house is fine including my brothers computer and hard drives.

PICTURE: http://postimg.org/image/9ychzvdw3/

I used ZAR X to scan the hard drive and it found all my files, but I would have to pay $70 to recover them...
 
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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Power cuts could cause it. Have you tried connecting the HDD like you had it before you installed the 3TB one? ie the only storage drive?

The fact you see the 2TB drive and then 29GB capacity tells me that your data is still on there, and should definitely be recoverable.

At the back of my mind, I can't stop thinking that this is likely caused by being in FAT32 format (your only FAT32 drive)......but I have no idea why that would matter if your files don't exceed 4GB each, and you don't try to increase the partition beyond 2TB.
 
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Calum Stewart

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Dec 3, 2013
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Yeah I tried that and still the same :/ Didnt even realise it was in FAT32, im pretty sure it wasnt before! I have files that are 50gb+ so maybe thats the problem. I've tried using recuva and it doesnt find any files at all. Theres no way to convert it to NFTS without formatting the drive is there?
 
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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Yeah, I've never heard of a drive switching from NTFS to FAT32 on it's own, so that is very strange. Normally it would go RAW.

There is Recua (http://www.piriform.com/recuva) made by the same company the makes CCCleaner - it should be able to recover your files.

As far as formatting to NFTS and saving your files, I could be wrong but I don't think it's possible, no.
 
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Calum Stewart

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Dec 3, 2013
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I've tried Recuva and it didnt find anything :/ I found a way to convert from Fat32 to NTFS without losing data, the only problem is that it tries to convert the 29Gb left on the hard drive and doesnt acknowledge the other 2TB of data.
 
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