external drive unreadable after defrag - please help..!

[seaking333]

hi,

I've just tried to defrag a 500Gb external USB drive.

It hung up in the middle and now I can't see any of my past TEN YEARS' work...

oh my god i feel SICK!

i've done some reading and got the 'recover my files' evaluation download.

can anyone give me any tips or even help guide me through this? as you can imagine, i'd be most grateful!!

thanks ****.

[GDH]

Dont panic, your data should still be accessible on the drive.

The main thing to remember is DO NOT write any new data to this drive - keep it exactly the way it is until you have recovered all possible data from it. This may mean purchasing a new backup drive (I presume you wont have enough space on your c but it is well worth it.

The first thing to try with Recover My Files (www.recovermyfiles.com) is to run a Complete Format Recover. In the drive selection window, select and search the physical 500 gb drive (it wont show as exactly 500gb but you will be able to tell which one it is by the size). In the file type selection window, search ONLY for the default selected file types.

Let this run for about an hour an then tell me what the progress window says - you should see "Files Found = xxxx" and "OS Items found = xxxx". Let me know those values and I will give you further instructions.

Thank you.

[seaking333]

Hello Graham,

Firstly let me say a big thank-you for, well, just being there!

Ok. I am running the 'complete format recovery' tool. It's been running for about 50 minutes and is about 7% through the drive.

The current values are:
files found: 314
O/S items found: 226

Cheers.

[GDH]

Please let the search continue to the end and then give me an update.

Thank you.

[seaking333]

Hi Graham

Here is the Event Log:

EventLog
Starting search of Lost Files on drive 2\
-
-
(then there were hundreds of these
Error: Error in processing PARTITION Driver at sector/cluster 0
Error: Error in processing JPEG Driver at sector/cluster 588935
(and a few of these
Error: Error in processing OLE Driver at sector/cluster 17243439
Error reading sector :31091496
Error reading sector :31091497
-
-
Completed search of drive 2
There were 88 NTFS file system entries found.
Found a total of 88 MFT entries.
Total Counts = 149398
Average Counts = 1493.98
Sigma = 12484.7645552329
Cutoff: 26218
Found NTFS partition at 63
Number of found NTFS partitions: 1
NTFS Partition 1 starts at 63
Found 4 directory entries in NTFS partition 1
There were 156505 FAT file system entries found.
Number of SectorClusters = 7
SectorClusters: 8 - 681669999 - 1
SectorClusters: 14 - 312777043 - 1
SectorClusters: 29 - 309744007 - 1
SectorClusters: 64 - 310819927 - 3
SectorClusters: 153 - 307055761 - 1
SectorClusters: 161 - 305918421 - 1
SectorClusters: 1857 - 264301983 - 1
Total Counts = 9
Average Counts = 1.28571428571429
Sigma = 0.264520028506443
Cutoff: 0
Found FAT partition at 310819927
Number of found FAT partitions: 1
FAT Partition 1 starts at 310819927
Drive too large for a FAT12 partition.
Found 31811 directory entries in FAT partition 1
All searches completed.
A total of 84554 file(s) were located.
Time Elapsed: 1505.51535 (mins)

[GDH]

What were the results of the search. The log indicates that it found and rebuilt a full FAT file system - were you able to see all your files in "Folder View" of the results screen?

[seaking333]

(i think i had about 100,000 files on this drive (maybe 84554 is right though) and as far as i knew it was a single partition NTFS format drive.. where this FAT partition came from eludes me!)

OK. in folder view there are only folders with red crosses on - about 600 in the FAT partition and about 12 in the NTFS partition. all are named by a cluster number or something and except for about 10 or so folders they are all completely empty!

The folders that do have stuff in contain only a handful of files from here & there on the drive... not a great deal of use to me - it's really just a drop in the ocean compared to what's actually on this drive.

In the other view it has found 83161 Wav files (i'm a composer & recording musician so wavs is what i'm mainly hoping to retrieve) however they are all unnamed (ie. 'recovered wave 00001' etc.) which will be a MAJOR pain in the *** to sort through.

Boy, this windows disk defragmenter has really f****d things up. can i sue microsoft?

What I'd really love is to be able to see the folder layout again - i have been reading about the MFT - i guess it's corrupted. Is there any way to retreive or rebuild it?

I'm also worried that a lot of these 'recovered wave 00001's will be fragmented and contain short bursts of material from different songs or white noise..

what to do?, what to do?

by the way, i have ordered a 500gb drive to back this stuff up to which will be here on Tuesday. Should i leave the computer on so i don't have to do the scan again? or are we going to try another type of scan or do something with the MFT to see if we can see this drive as it was?

lastly, as we're in different time zones i may stay up one night so we can do this a bit quicker - between what hours are you usually available to exchange emails? (i am in GMT London)

thanks again.

ps. can i recover Sony Acid song files?

[GDH]

Because of what has happened to your drive it looks like the File Allocation Table at the start of your drive has been completely screwed around. This is the table that holds all the file name and folder name information, so it is very unlikely given the results of your first search that you will ever get a meaningful file and folder structure back.

Probably your only option now is to run a "Complete File Search" of the drive for specific file types. This search finds files by using their unique header/structure/footer - but will not get the file or folder names. Yes, this is a real pain, no there is not much you can do about it.

You may also have a problem with fragmentation - although again it is difficult to say what state you files were in the the defrag problem happened. Obviously if the a file is in multiple parts over you disk then searching for the header/content/footer is not going to help.

There are some file renaming tools that may help for certain file types, such as "123renamer" (search Google for this), or you may try Explorer View for Windows Explorer from http://www.explorerview.com which you can use in Windows Explorer to play and rename the important files (use the F2 shortcut key to rename files).