Shit, files are gone!

[SpeedGeek]

I was messing around with my external LACIE Drive, which is configured as 2 FAT32 Drives, around 100G each.. I was connecting and disconnecting it to a new firewire card, and between all the installing the computer accidentily rebooted.. Now - EVERYTHING IS GONE.

It's very strange, cause the files still seem to be there some how, they are just all in a hidden folder called FILECHK.000 and all named FILECHK.001, 002, 003 and so on... Gigs and Gigs of files...

How do I recover this???

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

You don't

You let CHKDSK run on an external drive.

Just restore the files from backups (or originals if these were the backups).
- Pretty easy

 

[SpeedGeek]

WHAT?

Are you kidding?

I need THESE FILES.

My backups are 2 weeks old!

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Try here:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&hs=z2G&q=recovering+FILECHK&btnG=Search&meta=

Only 150 or so hits.

Recovering FILECHK.### is a lost art that ended around the days of Norton Utilities for DOS v8.0 and MS-DOS v5.0 included RECOVER but it was removed in MS-DOS v6.00

Since you're using FAT32 anyway, there is no software that is going to recover that data to what I would define as a 'usable' state. Internal file format structures have just changed far too much (eg: XML was not around in the MS-DOS days) for an application to reconstruct files from cluster sized recovery blocks (being FILECHK.000 to FILECHK.512++).

The limit of files within the root directory would've been reached well before CHKDSK made all the FILECHK.### files anyway, so you've lost a heap of data).


If you can run a TREE or DIR /A/S/B and DIR /A/S on the drive (or drives) - from a DOS version that can read FAT32 - and paste the results in here then 'maybe' we can help, but I wouldn't count on it.

RECOVER for MS-DOS 5 isn't going to help, as the underlying disk I/O differs, as does the file system (FAT32 vs FAT16 under DOS 5), force running it with SETVER would just corrupt the file system (much worse than you can imagine, and way worse than you've seen so far).

Norton Utilities (for DOS or Windows 3.x to XP) also isn't going to reassemble the files, and even if it could you'd need to manually rename them all back one by one - which could take months manually.

Errr, whatever you do - DO NOT RUN A DEFRAG on the volume(s) - It'll just make it harder for a professional to recover.

Expect to pay around US$1,000 to get that data reconstructed though, plus 5 to 10 years of inflation [].


If you can paste a DIR /A/S > C:\DUMPFILE.TXT and DIR /A/S/B > C:\DUMPFILE_2.TXT here on the forums, there is a slight chance (under 1%) that someone can help.

It has been over 10 years since I've needed to even assist with such a recovery, and HDDs where measured in MB back then, not GB - it was a much smaller job.

 

[johng24601]

I have used a program called Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro to recover files from all types of hard drives (including external). Just Google it and you can find it online. I've even used it to recover files from drives that had physical defects. I haven't used it on FAT32 partitions but it does support them. Just install the program on your main drive, not the drive you want to recover the files from, in fact don't write anything else to that drive until you are sure you have gotten everything off of it that you can. I'm sure there are other programs but as I said I've had good luck with this one.

It is also possible the external enclosure may be bad, that is what caused the problems I had once. The external enclosure that the drive was in was causing the file loss. After I recovered the files, I took the drive out of the enclosure, put it into another one, re-formatted it and it was fine. I put a new drive that was fine into the old enclosure and it had problems.

I wish you good luck.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

You can also try GetDataBack. Download the FAT32 version.

The trial is free, it shows you what data it can find and recover. You can buy it at that point and then actually recover the data if it has found what you're looking for.