Recoger data un external hard drive

I have an external hard drive that has all of our pictures. Our laptop crashed and we lost what is in it. So I was making a copy of our hard drive onto our new laptop and an copy onto a new external hard drive. Several folders copied successfully but now the majority of the rest of the folders are inaccessible. I see the name of the folder but can't open it, copy it or anything.
How can I recover my lost files? Let me know what information is needed.

Thanks!
Andreyta

Don't get your hopes up too high but you can try using Recuva from the makers of CCleaner to see if it can recover any of your lost files. Your other option is to take the drive to a data recovery service but understand that can cost many $100s to several $1000.

I tried Recuva but is scans, and then it gets hung up on step 3 ouf 3 and won't finish scanning. I downloaded pandora as well and it won't work on my pc. I get the error that "the application failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail." I have no idea what that means.

 

I downloade a demo version of File Scavenger. It is scanning right now but it has started to give me these errors:
Media errors reading sectors xxxxxxx to xxxxxxx on Pysical Drive 2. Use Options, Scan, Sector Exclusion to skip bad sectors or use Disk Recoup.

 

I know there are places that can cost a lot. I am hoping there are several things I can try before I give up and start saving $$ for this.

 

Thanks.

After googling for a while now, I think what happened was that this is somehow related to a chkdsk? My folders have been changed to files. Is there a way to restore the file structure? I can't get recuva to finish running to see if I see deleted files.

I have these found.000 folders with chk files…

Hopefully someone can help on how to get my folders with files structure back! Thanks.

chkdsk does not corrupt disks - it finds and attempts to recover corrupted data and sectors. So chkdsk is telling you your disk is corrupted and that is what it found. Sorry, but I think you only help now is a file recovery service.

I sense that this drive was used as the only location for this photos. Of course hindsight tends to be 20/20 but it is important to keep multiple backups of all our data.

my number one recommendation always for recovering lost files is photorec but it's not the easiest of tools to use and you must make sure your saving any found files on a seperate hard drive to the one your searching.

 

here's a guide with links to download the program. :- http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

 

 

PhotoRec (and its ilk)

As you noticed, PhotoRec seems to recover more (at the cost of lost filenames). I'll explain.

The above explanation is how some data-recovery programs work. It is generally more reliable because it looks at real files that existed more recently. However (not surprisingly perhaps), it can miss out on some files. That is why other programs like PhotoRec use a different approach. Instead of looking at a deleted file's information (filename, size, timestamp, starting cluster) in directory entry and then copying the clusters from the disk, they search the whole disk for lost files.

Most file types have a signature (usually at the start of the file, in the header) which contains a sequence of bytes that identify the file as a certain type. Because of this, programs that open a file can determine if the file is teh correct type and other programs can verify the type of a file.

What some data-recovery programs do is to search the disk and check each cluster to see if they contain the signature of various different file types. If a cluster contains a signature, then it copies that cluster (and more depending on various factors) to a file.

This means that it can find some files that are not linked in any directories. That's good, but there are some downsides:

• Because it searches the disk directly instead of directory entries, it has no information about the file, so it applies a generic filename, and gives it the current date/time for the timestamp instead of the file's original one
• Because it has no information about the file, it does not know how big the file is supposed to be. Some (few?) filetypes indicate the exact size in the header, so most of the files that are recovered will, at best, be rounded up to the nearest cluster while others can end up being ridiculously huge (e.g., a 10x10 GIF file that is 1.7GB!)
• Like with the other data-recovery method, it has no way of recovering fragmented files and only copies contiguous (unused) clusters regardless of whether they belong to the file or not (check the files that PhotoRec recovered; plenty will be half-corrupt like the ones that Recuva recovered
• Because it is manually scanning the disk, it will "recover" a whole lot more files than programs that use the other method; many of these files are legitimately deleted files that may have been erased a long time ago, and they also come from all over the disk, not just a specific directory. This means a lot more clutter and more files that have to be examined and sorted through. The problem is that

http://superuser.com/questions/432535/successful-data-recovery-but-most-files-are-corrupted

 

Ok. Thanks. I will give that software a try.
Is there a software I can use to make an exact copy of the drive even with bad sectors to scan that image vs the actual drive?

Does anyone know ddrescue? would that work perhaps? Or this one here? http://www.usbharddriverecovery.net/corrupted.html

Thanks. (PS. Is it possible to edit the thread? Just noticed my typo on recover)

sorry for very late reply but just in case you still haven't sorted your problem then yes ddrescue will be able to clone/image your hard drive even with bad sectors not sure about any other software though but i guess macrium reflect is also worth trying if your not sure on how to use ddrescue.

 

i know nothing about the software you linked to so would probably avoid it myself.