NTFS External Hard Drive recovery

[anicol]

I have some important data that due to my haphazard backup strategy that needs amendment is only on this one drive.

The drive was pulled out and/or powered down and now when it's plugged into Windows it is recognized but I'm asked to Format the drive. Instead of formatting I plugged it into Ubuntu and it gave me "You need to run chkdsk /f on it from Windows" message. I started that process but then was reading information about how chkdsk can potentially set all the sectors bad so I killed it when it was at stage 2 and 63% by closing the command window.

Then I tried a ddrescue from Ubuntu and it was not able to read anything. I've tried Active Partition Recovery and GetDataBack with no luck at all.

Did chkdsk mess up my drive for good, or should I run it again?

I would really like to get this data back. Any suggestions?

 

[hang-the-9]

Well, stopping it while it was checking files is not going to make things any better here. You have a couple of options, have chkdsk finish and see if that fixed anything, or take the drive to a data recovery shop.

You can probably try the testdisk program and see if that can recover the partition info on the drive, chances are the data is all there, but Windows just can't get to it because the partition info is gone.