lost files on external HDD

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the thing is that one day i lost acces to my picture folder on external HDD after i ran chdsk i got acces to it but i lost one subfolder .

chdsk says no bad sectors found HDD recovery says same when run notmaly but when i run it on boot up it finds oen bad sector but can't recover it .

ran few file recovery programs they find few missing files but not all

HDD was alawys used only for storage and nothign was instaled on it or no heavy use too

was wonderig if u knwo any good HDD recovery programs or way to fix thsi issue

thank you

Go to the web site of the hard drive manufacturer and download their diagnostic program. It will be a .iso file you use to create a bootable CD from. Boot it and run their diagnostics, see what they say about the drive.

If it's okay, then give Recuva a try, see what it finds.

hmm tried downloading diagnostic tools from manufacturers site it came as .exe file not .iso ran it but not in boot up mode didn't find anything wrong. ran Recuva also found files but only deleted ones

What is the make of the hard drive? Maybe I can find the .iso file.

it's ''Seagate'' . i played with Recuva options a bit and ran full scan again found some photos this time that doesn't show up on hard drive but still not nearly half of them also tried to run trila version of HDD Mechanic 1.3 it found all missing files but can't get them back cause it's only trial version .

I would bet that paid version of HDD Mechanic (at $139.95) will have no more success actually recovering the files than Free Recuva did. If they gave yo some kind of guarantee it might be worth it, but I doubt that's the case. Do you use the external drive as a backup or just an external data storage area? By this I mean are you using a program like Acronis or Macrium to backup your system or are you just copying/moving files there manually? I don't know how much room your pictures and other files on that drive occupy but would it be feasible to burn them to DVD at 4.3GB or a dual layer DVD at 8.5GB per? That would give you a reasonable degree of safety for the future.I know for myself, all my pics occupy over 12GB but that will fit on 3 DVDs so I burn them there every few months.

You need to download the SeaTools for DOS to get the .iso version from here: SeaTools for DOS.
📎SeaTools_for_DOS.jpg

i used it just as a external storage space kinda thought if HDD has no programs on it and if not used a lot cpoying files back and forth it shouldn't get messed up but i guess i was wrong lol well yeah now that i lost some of them it was first thing i did copied what's left of them to DVD and yeah i didn't find enough info on NDD mechanic whether it does what it says on a box and such and to be honest can't rly afford it atm anyways gonna give that bootable scan a try now

SeaTools will tell you if you have a hard drive problem or not. I would guess not since you can get to everything else on the drive. No chance you have those files saved anywhere else I guess. Rats, I hate losing data, especially pictures that can't be replaced.

well bootable SeaTools didn't recognize my external HDD they only found my main drive i guess that's cause it's external… i think it has to be something cause of HDD Regenerator found one bad sector on boot up scan but wasn't able to recover it and i'm sure they weren't deleted cause it's only me who uses this PC. and yeah don't have them photos anywhere else or else i'd just get rid of the HDD and keep everything on a DVD :))))

Rats, forgot about it being external. If you really want to check iut, you could mount it as a 2nd internal drive. As for the pictures, I think they're gone for good, sorry.

don't really wanna open the case to plug HDD in since i still got warranty for the PC which would void it … do you know any good freeware software like HDD regenator that should scan and fix bad sectors on drive? if that wouldn't help my last resort would be to wait till my brother gets back from holidays and plug it to his laptop hoping theres somethign wrong my external drive casing or conection

Why would opening the case to add a 2nd hard drive void your warranty? This is a perfectly normal thing to do if you want to add additional hard drive space so it should not void the warranty. I know of no other software that will do a better job than Recuva, sorry.

it's got that warranty seal once you open the case you break it and warranty is void . welll anyways thanks for help i guess gonna go try to contact Seagate maybe they got some warranty too lol thanks

hmm i snooped around a bit longer and tried 'DiskDigger' seems to find way more files than any other non demo software that allowes to save files. has it's own drawbacks but so far i'm pretty happy to get atleast some of files back:))