Is drive corrupted / dying?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nick
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Nick

This morning I had a power failure and I dont have a UPS.
OS is Win98SE
On reboot, I found that a bunch of files and folders had disappeared from my
D drive (20Gb Maxtor) including my email message store, phones books etc.
and 10Gb of stored photos.
The drive seems to be working fine now, but explorer shows it as having
670mb of used space only and 19+Gb free.
Any suggestions as to what might have happened, and is there anything I can
do to retrieve the missing data? Is this drive on the way out or does the
problem lie elsewhere?
TIA
Nick.
 
This morning I had a power failure and I dont have a UPS.
OS is Win98SE
On reboot, I found that a bunch of files and folders had disappeared from my
D drive (20Gb Maxtor) including my email message store, phones books etc.
and 10Gb of stored photos.
The drive seems to be working fine now, but explorer shows it as having
670mb of used space only and 19+Gb free.
Any suggestions as to what might have happened, and is there anything I can
do to retrieve the missing data? Is this drive on the way out or does the
problem lie elsewhere?
TIA
Nick.
Click to expand...

Was the entire drive a single partition or all these missing files on
the same partition as the 670MB of data that's still accessible?

I suspect you have a corrupted FAT table. There are several recovery
softwares that might copy off the missing data to a second drive, but
if you (or the OS/Apps/etc) has written anything to the drive (as I'm
sure happened at least after you opened and closed your email client)
then there may be at least a few files lost or corrupted. I know that
Ontrack's EasyRecovery will do this (recovery without writing to that
drive), but I don't know if there are any good free programs. Of
course this means you need another drive, not necessarily empty but it
must have that much free space on it.

You might also find that simply doing a scandisk (or if you have
Norton Utilities, their Disk Doctor app) could recover the files, but
since these programs change data on the drive holding the data to be
recovered, they should be avoided except as a last resort. Of course
if the data is valuable you should never run them, instead contacting
a data recovery service first.



Dave
 
kony said:
Was the entire drive a single partition or all these missing files on
the same partition as the 670MB of data that's still accessible?

I suspect you have a corrupted FAT table. There are several recovery
softwares that might copy off the missing data to a second drive, but
if you (or the OS/Apps/etc) has written anything to the drive (as I'm
sure happened at least after you opened and closed your email client)
then there may be at least a few files lost or corrupted. I know that
Ontrack's EasyRecovery will do this (recovery without writing to that
drive), but I don't know if there are any good free programs. Of
course this means you need another drive, not necessarily empty but it
must have that much free space on it.

You might also find that simply doing a scandisk (or if you have
Norton Utilities, their Disk Doctor app) could recover the files, but
since these programs change data on the drive holding the data to be
recovered, they should be avoided except as a last resort. Of course
if the data is valuable you should never run them, instead contacting
a data recovery service first.



Dave
Click to expand...

Thanks for that Dave,
entire drive is a single partition. Fortunately I did a full backup a while
back so I think I have only lost a couple of weeks data which isn't the end
of the world. I must get into a routine of regular backups, today has
perhaps been a good warning!
I ran Norton Disk Doctor which reported and fixed an error with the free
space. Other than that no faults at all.
Thanks again

Nick.
 
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