External Hard Drive says recycle bin and files are corrupted, cannot open anything, and no other fixes will work.

Silmefaron

Honorable
Dec 20, 2015
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10,660
Hi all, I own a Toshiba Canvio Connect external hard drive. I have owned it for about a year and a half if I remember correctly. I have always been able to back up to it, put files on it, and run steam and steam games of of it. My operating system on my custom built PC is windows 8.1.

The other day a file disappeared. Later that day two more disappeared. A little while after that, plugging it into a different computer, I attempted to open it and it said "drive e:\ is corrupted and unreadable". I attempted to run a chkdsk /r on it. The chkdsk replaced all of the security ids. It then verified the files, but i still could not access them. This time it told me "Access Denied". The Security tab under properties for the external hard drive was grayed out and would not allow me to change settings.

I messed around (do not remember exactly how i did it) and finally allowed access to the drive. It now had a 785GB free of 931GB bar underneath the listed drive in my computer. I was able to open the E:/ drive at that point, but yet another warning told me "The Recycle Bin on E:\ is corrupted, do you want to empty the recycle bin for this drive?" I said no, because I feared that it would permanently delete all files that the /r command might have "fixed" and i would have no way to recover them if "Yes" was the wrong thing to choose.

I attempted to see if the active partition was set incorrectly on the drive under diskmgmt.msc, and it said the drive was healthy and active. Running a scan under properties also came up with no problems. I ran an administrative level chkdsk e: /scan and it also came up with no problems detected on the disk. I am out of ideas as to how to "un-corrupt" or somehow recover these files. They are very important to me (family photos, extremely important schoolwork, etc.). I would prefer not to pay for professional service if i can fix this myself. Is this the point where I bring in a software recovery program? Any help is much appreciated as I am unsure of what other steps I can take. Thank you.
 
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TyrOd

Honorable
Aug 16, 2013
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11,160


Running checkdisk is a bad idea when you don't know exactly what's wrong. Checkdisk will attempt to reallocate/replace bad(unreadable sectors) and as a result can actually create more corruption than it fixes.

The first thing you'll want to do is make a full clone/image(sector by sector) copy of the drive as it is before continuing.

There is the basic way to do this with simply cloning tools like acronis trueimage, but if the drive is unstable or has bad/unreadable sectors due to bit error defects developing than those tools will either fail or slow to a crawl when they run into read errors.

The more advanced way is to use DDRESCUE which is a Linux based utility with a lot more flexibility.

Once you've got a full clone/image, then you can move on to using software recovery tools like getdataback, rstudio, recuva, easus, etc... on the clone/image you've made.

Of course you can try to run those software recovery tools on the original drive, but if the drive is unstable, has bad sectors, or is in the early stages of electronic or mechanical failure, you will risk causing more damage before data can be recovered.

Also, even if you aren't planning to use a professional data recovery service, it still may be useful to get a free evaluation done from a reputable company that offers a risk free diagnostic/quote. It will give you a baseline for understanding what you can and can't do on your own safely.

Best regards,

TYR
 
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