External hard drive taken on directory structure of another drive. Help

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mw8t

Limp Gawd
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Dec 9, 2012
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I don't know how I've done it but between swapping discs in my external caddy one of my disks has taken on the file structure of another. Space used is still showing as correct. What do I do?

The disk was coming up with unreadable or corrupt when trying to access so I run chkdsk /f g: and that's when it took on the different file structure
 
What do I do?
Click to expand...

The easiest way is to recover files from your backups.

Although with that said (if you don't have a backup) you may want to create a bit for bit copy of the drive to a brand new disk and try a recovery program on the copy.
 
drescherjm said:
The easiest way is to recover files from your backups.

Although with that said (if you don't have a backup) you may want to create a bit for bit copy of the drive to a brand new disk and try a recovery program on the copy.
Click to expand...
No backup.

How would i make a bit for bit copy? I have a spare hdd same size
 
I would do that with ddrescue. Although this requires that you know a little about linux.

This seems to be a reasonable guide:
https://www.data-medics.com/forum/h...ive-with-bad-sectors-using-ddrescue-t133.html

WARNING: If you do this make absolutely sure you know which drive is the source and which is the dest. The program does not care at all if you mix that up. It does not look what is on either drive it just copies bit for bit. I recommend you disconnect all other drives from your system to make this simpler.
 
Sorry I got mixed up. The space used is not showing the same. It is showing what it would if the other drives files were on this disk. Sorry for confusion. Have I lost the data?

None of the files on the drive are usable though

I know nothing of linux
 
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Have you shut down the computer, removed power from the caddy, then rebooted? There could be a caching issue that is causing Windows to see the old drive's meta-data and not the new drives.
 
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ryan_975 said:
Have you shut down the computer, removed power from the caddy, then rebooted? There could be a caching issue that is causing Windows to see the old drive's meta-data and not the new drives.
Click to expand...
Yeah I've tried this.

I've hooked it up to my server and it's showing same behaviour. I'm on the server thru remote access from same computer though so might the cache thing still apply? The server is headless.

I'm currently running chkdsk /r on the drive but looks like it will be many hours (6tb). It's looking for bad clusters. Might this solve it?

I downloaded getdataback demo and it also reports same file structure. Not looking good this is it?
 
You should stop doing anything to the drive at all until you can get a bit-for-bit copy made. Not doing so has a high chance of you not being able to recover any data from the drive.
 
Why do so many people not have backups. It blows my mind.
 
Ok an update.

Chkdsk /r came back with no bad sectors as i suspected it would but no change on the files and directories.

Fired up getmydataback and had a poke round. Changed the level from 1 to 4 and started the scan. 13 hours to go but it seems to be picking up the thousands of files i had on their rather than the 163 it was reporting with the other drives info.

We shall see what happens.
 
Did you have NTFS snapshotting (aka system restore) enabled? Maybe you can get the files back that way.
 
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I did not mate.

However the scan has just finished and it's found the full 6tb of data. phew

Now I've just got to find the $79 to pay for the program licence.

Ah well expensive mistake. ALWAYS SAFELY REMOVE HARDWARE when messing about with external storage. Lesson learned
 
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