Panicky - chkdsk apparantly deleted a lot, need to recover

[Kuo]

So I've googled this a little and found similar reports, but no solution :(

Am I dead in the water?

I booted up Windows and chkdsk decided to run, so I said what the hell... I stupidly left to go to the bathroom and when I came back, it turns out that chkdsk had been incredibly busy.

Deleted orphaned files, or recovered some, and did a lot of other things.

At the end of the day, my drive suddenly has 50 gigs free (up from 2 gigs) as well as MANY MANY MANY files missing.

Is there ANY WAY I can get those back? I'm crying :(

[Limahl]

Whatever you do DON'T write any new data to the drive until you try to get back what is lost.

I've had the best luck with O&O products, either UnErase or DiskRecovery, here's a link to it......

http://www.oo-software.com/en/datarecovery/

They have download trials which may be enough to help you out for free.

Good luck.

[Kuo]

Yeah I'm currently creating a disk image of the drive in question onto another drive "just in case."

I've been looking into disk/file recovery software.. and most of them have 2 general options for recovery.

This is taken from GetData's "Recover My Files" :

Fast File Search
Will locate recently deleted files. Full file and folder names will be recovered if possible. Search will take between 0 - 2 hours depending on drive size and computer speed.

Complete File Search
Will locate recently deleted files with full file and folder names. Includes an additional full drive search to find "lost files" which are no longer identified by the Windows Operating System. Lost Files are returned with generic names like "Recovered_Word_1". A Complete File Search will take 1 to 8 hours depending on drive size and the number of file types selected. Multimedia files are the most resource intensive to recover. Run a separate search for these file types.

Fast Format Recover
Use this search when for formatted or corrupt drives (if a drive letter is not recognized you can select the "physical drive" in the following screen). This search will locate all files in the missing drive partition with full file and folder names. The search will take from 1 to 20 minutes.

Complete Format Recover
This search is best used when a drive has been formatted and Windows has been reinstalled. Search only for the default selected file types (only add file types if the default selected file types were not on your disk). At the end of the search the old partition will be reconstructed. Will take from 1 to 8 hours depending on drive size and computer speed.
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As I mentioned above, many of the other programs have similar search options. Which one fits me more closely?

I didn't delete files.. but Id idn't format either.. windows just kept saying the word "orphan" - delete/recover - and rebuilding indexes

[Kuo]

Well that's sad. I just called up the tech support of a company that makes a disk recovery software and described to them my problem.

The tech guy told me that he knows the problem I'm describing and that, unfortunately, no software can fix the problem :( They say that when chkdsk deletes those files, they delete everything - the link and all - and then proceed to rewrite those sectors w/ chkdsk files so nothing is recoverable :( He said my only bet would be to send it off to some place that can do a physical recovery of it or something.... this is depressing news.

[Limahl]

I'd give one of the O&O programs a shot at it before giving up hope. You have nothing to lose at this point really.

I had the same thing happen to me once on a 300 GB storage drive, and I got probably 80% of it back.

Data recovery is a tricky thing, it all depends on "how" it was removed from the drive and if any data has been written since. Just booting the machine usually fubars some of it because the swap file gets modified usually, writing out some data in the process.

Wish you luck.

[Kuo]

It partially worked!

O&O is working right now, but I've already scanned through some of the recovered files and some of the stuff that I've been hoping to get back came back to me! Although I do notice a lot of repeats.... like I have about 20 copies of the several file now that O&O somehow thought were different or something. And it's funny to see 700 MB JPG that should really be < 1 MB (is there a way I can re-compress this JPG? heh)

But I got another question now. Do most of these disk recovery softwares work the same? Would I get any more files back if I was to run another disk recovery software? If the difference is marginal then it might not be worth my time (cause aside from letting it scan, I would have to manually compare thousands of files to see which one the 2nd program recovered that O&O didn't recover).

[Fark_Maniac]

I used a program called "File Scavenger 3.0"...I recently had to find a free one since my media drive died and had lots of 500+ MB files. There is also a PCIFR3.exe in my 'data recovery' folder...I forget who makes it...but I must have tried it. Hope this helps some.

[DarkCyber]

Several months back I had a hd I needed to recover alot of stuff from and I tried numerous recovery programs with mixed results. Until I ran across GetDataBack. I tried it and recovered everything on that hd. I've since had to use it on another hd and with the same results. This is the only one that I've been pleased with. I know there may be many others out there, but this one really works.

[Limahl]

You could certainly try more than one program and see if you get different results, its quite possible you may.

Glad you got some of it back. The file size thing I'm not sure about, never had that happen to me, someone else may be able to offer better advice there.

[XOR != OR]

I bet this teaches you to back up your data.

Go get yourself an external usb2 drive. They are cheap for huge drives. Back up your crap to that nightly. That way, if you run into this problem again, you have your backups.

Also, let this serve as a reminder to everyone reading this thread: GO BACK UP YOUR DATA!

[Kuo]

In my own defense, I do keep extremely critical files backed up - and I didn't lose any of those.

But it's sorta like -- you don't know what's important until it's gone. Or... you take things for granted until they're gone.

I had back ups of my "life critical" files, what I lost were mostly of sentimental value (eg pictures), and thus I was crying at the time of posting yesterday (figuratively).

Now in regard to the actual post, what's the easiest way to setup an automatic backup of certain directories/folders in a Windows system? I use to add to linux cron table a backup job everynight, but I don't know of an equivalent Windows job. I liked linux backup too cause it would first compare your directories and then only backup the new files (loved linked files). What in Windows does the same?

And also, I have 650 GB of internal HD space... I can't possibly back it ALL up, even with "cheap external drives." And further more, this crash & lost of data happened as I was setting my computer up to back stuff up. I have just purchased an external 300 gig HD and was in the process of organizing my files to be back uped when I lost it all. Guess I got nothing to backup now though, haha.

And yes, I have considered setting an internal HD up as a backup, almost like a manual RAID 0 (i think it was 0, maybe 1?) setup for redundacy. But so far I've always needed that space instead of having redundacy. Time to think about how I want everything structured at the end of the day though...

Oh and your tone of voice is sorta harsh for someone who just lost a lotta data. It's sorta like rubbing it in :(

[edit] GetDataBack worked miracles for me! Compared to O&O's software, the data recovery that I've gotten w/ GDB has been better. It found more files and successfully retrieved more of them than O&O and it kept many of the directory structure and filename that O&O failed to do. Now it could be that I setup O&O incorrectly or something, but so far GetDataBack has been doing a great job :) I think by the end of the day I could have recovered a whole 90% of the data, which is remarkable IMHO. It'll just take me another day to go through all the files, rename some of them, and merge them back in w/ my existing data (esp those that lost their directory structures)

[edit] After I finish all this recovery, do you guys think the drive that had this problem is still safe to use? I'm 99% sure the error wasn't on the drive but on something else (software issues, bad IDE cable, or something) due to some other testing I did earlier. When chkdsk performed earlier (causing me to lose my information), it reported 0 bad sectors. Can I just copy my information back on the drive. Would formatting the drive first do anything? (I already lost most of the data on it - and recovering it currently - formatting wouldn't really erase anything).

[Unknown-One]

RAID 1 sounds like a good idea, just be sure that the two drives you get are from different batches so there is less chance of both failing at the same time. With RAID 1, as long as at least one drive is working, you can do a rebuild and get all your data back. You can even run from the mirror drive while the other one is dead…

[XOR != OR]

RAID 1 sounds like a good idea, just be sure that the two drives you get are from different batches so there is less chance of both failing at the same time. With RAID 1, as long as at least one drive is working, you can do a rebuild and get all your data back. You can even run from the mirror drive while the other one is dead…
raid5 is nice too.

/me pets his 1TB raid 5 drive, gently.

And I *still* backup to an external drive, as well as spread the important things around on my network. :)

[Kuo]

Whoops, what I meant in my post was a way to mimic the behaviour of Raid 1/5. My machine doesn't have RAID... so I was looking for suggestions on software that might mimic the redundacy backup instead of manually, every night, dragging my folders to backup.

[Fark_Maniac]

you could create a batch file and schedule it to run with Task Scheduler

[DarkCyber]

Just put an additional hd in your system and run something like Second Copy or Sync Toy and let it auto backup your important stuff to that hd. Photos, important documents and other super important things burn to DVD.

Also, I'm telling you, even if you don't backup...that GetDataBack program worked great...I got back everything on 2 different systems i.e. hd's. I worked clearly the best of all the programs I used and hands down beat them all. And this was after both hd's had been completely formatted and the OS reinstalled and most of all the apps reinstalled.

[F1xxer]

Most of the time when check disk recoveres orphaned files it moves them into hidden system folders called "found.000" "found.001" "found.002" etc. on the root of the corrupted drive.

You'll have to go to folder options and uncheck the option to not show hidden files and folders, and also uncheck hide protected operating system files. You'll see those folders on the root of your drive. All your non corrupted files would have been sitting in there.

[Kuo]

Wow I didn't know about the [found] thing! I was wondering what the hell chkdsk was recovering when I didn't see anything!

GetDataBack actually found all the files within [found] and gave them back to me... but now that I did what you said, I also see those files just sitting there!

There's still many more files that GDB got me back that wasn't in found.. but at least now I know. Thanks :)

[nessus]

Oh and your tone of voice is sorta harsh for someone who just lost a lotta data. It's sorta like rubbing it in

Expect it to be rubbed in, especially on a technical forum. You won't ever forget the lesson that way and will be a lot less complacent. You'll probably mention it to most everyone you talk to for the next few days the more emotionally involved in it you are. The more backup is evangalzed the better.

For something as important as backup is, and something that is as easy and inexpensive as it can be to set up now, its something that people ignore.

RAID of any form doesn't provide any protection from the type of issue you had, only backup can. A mirror would have just written the same bad file system data to multiple drives. RAID (other than RAID 0 which offers no protection at all) protects you from disk failure, it provides no protection from software corruption of the file system.


I use to add to linux cron table a backup job everynight, but I don't know of an equivalent Windows job. I liked linux backup too cause it would first compare your directories and then only backup the new files (loved linked files). What in Windows does the same?


I know its really hard to click "Start>Help and Support" and search on "schedule backup". It's painful to then click the one and only suggested task which is "Pick a task > Schedule a backup" and follow the step by step instructions.

Actually launching the built-in backup application supplied with the OS, then clicking help?

I'm sorry I've responded so harshly when what you need is so thoroughly obfuscated by the manufacturer on every XP install ever performed, by default.

Especially when you've bothered to schedule it on Linux in the past and know better...

I mean, who would think of looking for it in the built-in help. :eek:

Yep, you'll get lots of sympathy for that. :rolleyes:

[Kuo]

I guess it's my semi distrust in Microsoft that I didn't look in the help menu, especially after my experience w/ chkdsk. That doesn't make me any more comfortable with letting Microsoft manage my backups.

As I said, I had backups of my incredibly important files. And even w/ today's prices, I at the moment cannot afford to buy another 600 gigs to act as a redundancy backup. What I will do instead is start sorting through my stuff and seeing if I can mainstream some of my files, re-do my file organization, and somehow cut down on how much space I actually need, thereby being able to allocate what will become "extra" space on a drive to becoming a backup. But even then, I don't see it as conceivable to back EVERYTHING up, just my important files (which I already) along w/ the files that I'm most attached to (which this experience has nicely pointed out to me).

I think advice, or a reminder, to keep backups is just and right. The tone of voice used might even be appropriate, if it was delayed by a day. It's really kicking someone in the balls so soon after. It's like if someone got into a severe accident because of some neglicence on your part, and then your neighbor comes by and reminds you of it the day after the accident (ok, bad analogy, but the point is there).

And about the RAID backup then.. from the above posters, they saying that a RAID backup is good. But you're saying even if I had the forsight to perform a RAID backup, I would still have been screwed?

And who said anything about sympathy? I didn't come here to get sympathy, or anything emotional at that. Sure I expressed my emotion at the time, but the gist of my posts have been to get information. Personally I perfer emotionaless replies... but rubbing it in does not count as one. You have sympathy at one end, you have neutral replies in the middle, and rubbing it in at the other end. I like neutral =)

Anyway,.that's the last I'm going to say about the whole rubbing it in thing. It de-rails from what I want, is inapproriate for what you yourself said is a technical forum, but I just had to say as a last rebuttal.

And I'll check out the Windows backup... but if there are any none MS/Windows suggestions, I would like them :)