All files are missing within hard drive.

To continue on from where it was cut off....  

...(was the dianogistic from windows XP disk management) then lower it had F:\ and to the right it says 1000 (well more than 1000 i can't remember it is late) GB unallocated space. Now my thought is that this is what is causing the problem. it was saying its capacity on the properties of the F:\ to be 1.5 Terrabytes.

Now rather than having to recover all the files (which i don't have enough space to recover anyway) is there any other way to either get rid of the allocated space (as it is obviously flawed) or fix my external hard drive WITHOUT formatting.

Formatting would only be my last option as am not wanting to lose all my work such as Progarmming files, my project files for Microsoft Visual Studio etc as well as all of my games (who can be bothered reinstalling over 50 games? )

Rather than just telling me things i already know such as data recovery are useless to me right now. I have seen a disk capacity changer (which isn't really what i need as far as i can tell)

What are your thoughts?

Thanks for your time

You should check the specs of this external HDD. You are saying that, in Windows Disk Management in its lower right pane, the disk is represented by one horizontal block containing three sub-blocks. One small one on the left end will show a label like "Disk_1" and a size (Like maybe 1.36 GB) and a few other bits. To its right is one block representing the Partition you have been using as your F: drive, with a size of about 460 GB. To the right again is a larger block called "Unallocated Space" with a size of over 1000 GB. Is all that right? If it is, Disk Management is telling you the HDD unit has a total capacity of 1.5 TB or more, and only one-third of it has been allocated to a Partition used as your F: drive. The remaining space is Unallocated currently and could be used to create one or more additional Partitions that each would be treated a separate drives with their own new letter names.

Now, if the specs for your unit say it is NOT that big, and only about 500 GB in total space, then Disk Management is getting some bad data from somewhere. Maybe the disk's Partition Table has bad data (I've never heard of this error from such a source), or maybe the enclosure's interface is misinterpreting some HDD data. You could try moving the HDD unit from the enclosure into the computer case temporarily as an internal drive to see what it shows when mounted that way, under the mobo's controller (rather than the enclosure's). If you do this, take a close look at the HDD unit's label and look up its specs at the manufacturer's website, just to confirm.

Well thanks for the help. I do see what your getting at.

But i woke up this morning, and to my surpise... i have all my files back! i have lost about 15 GB worth of files which was a bit disappointing (i am going through right now to see what i have lost) but it could've been worse.


It was the unallocated space's fault. And it seems that Windows has repaired this, i am guessing as it turned off (it took about 5 minutes longer to turn off and i don't think it would've done it while its turned off   ), i am still a bit afraid to touch any of the files in fear of it happening again but hopefully i'll get over it.

Thanks Paperdoc for the post.

Umm new problem.

I have corrupted files with in my hard drive. (suprise suprise i knew this would happen)
I also have the problem that it seems that F:\ (the root) is corrupted so no new files can't be made and such.

I have deleted the files that

A) Shouldn't be there as they were deleted a long time ago
B) Files that are deemed useless.

5 folders and 2 files i have found so far would be deemed useless as they wouldn't work when i tryed to check them, the problem is now i can't delete them as they don't exist according to windows.

Run Windows' Scandisk on that drive. It can fix several types of file mix-ups. sometimes it can re-establish the proper links and recover a file that seems lost. More often what it will do is make sure that anything deleted really is cleanly deleted or moved to your Recycle Bin (you could restore it from there if that's where it goes). Then when you empty the Recycle Bin you should have a clean error-free disk.

By the way, if you looked in Disk Management, what did it really have to say about the disk size, its Partitions, and any Unallocated Space?