Have a hairy disk recovery - the best way? (found.000 folders)

Hi,

The less you write on the disk higher your recovery chance are.

You have a very good plan, If the Diskxxxx directory are recognizable by their content and you have not lost file names, Just copy the directories else where and rename them. Try to recover the maximum before starting to use recovery software...

In your case Corrupted File structures are hard to recover. Because chkdsk already performed a recovery operation on your drive. and has already Written on the disk.

After recovering all salvageable files. You can start using Recovery software to see what options they give you.

And finally, I know How Expensive it can be. But buying an OEM Lenovo Laptop that supports a real OEM Lenovo dock station. As always been "paying" for me. In all senses.

MaloK said:

Hi,


You have a very good plan,

In your case Corrupted File structures are hard to recover. Because chkdsk already performed a recovery operation on your drive. and has already Written on the disk.

And finally, I know How Expensive it can be. But buying an OEM Lenovo Laptop that supports a real OEM Lenovo dock station. As always been "paying" for me. In all senses.

Thanks. That's what I figured, I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything. Something like a "Magic file disk structure restorer to use after Chkdsk screws up your disk - FOSS" program or something.

Definitely I didn't touch the disk until I was able to get a back up. And I'm copying everything over to that.

And as to the Dock... yeah. Yes, I know... Yeah. But they all use DisplayPort and I think that's where the problem lies. But nobody knows Lenovo like Lenovo, for sure. And Lenovo does seem to be 'just a little different' in how they wire their things together. We'll see. I'm off all docks for now though, for sure.

No magic recovery after chkdsk recovered... Sorry.

But if you feel you still have files deleted, I use Get Data Back Pro. and never regretted a penny I spent on it.

Also use a cheap passive DP to VGA over a KMV and it works great.

RECOVER CHK FILE FROM FOUND.000 FOLDER - YouTube

Jasong222 said:

Hey all,

Hope this is the best place. Didn't see another forum good for drive recoveries. Lemme know and I'll move/repost if necessary. I have a drive structure that crashed and I have files all over the place. Just want to make sure I'm recovering in the: best, easiest, most effective way possible.

What happened: I had bought a new USB dock that was giving me trouble. An expansion dock, where you plug the dock into your computer then you plug our devices, monitors, keyboard, mouse, external hard drives, etc. into the dock. Had a new one, it was giving me problems, the video signal kept crashing. I was working with support from the company trying different things, etc. "Then one day" turns out it borks one of my external drives. If I remember correctly, something like the drive unmounted as was not visible in file explorer, but could be seen and remounted by other programs. I try different things - blah blah blah - and I guess I ran chkdsk instead of just remounting it. ANYWAY-

The drive was almost exclusively video files. Some thumbnails, .nfo files, etc., but it was a video drive.
There were, say, 5 main root directly folders. A few only had one or two things in them. The others had multiple dozens and hundreds of files inside. About 2T total space.

Here's what I've got now-

• A couple of the 5 root folders appear normally, seemingly fine. I haven't gone through file by file, but it looks like they're all there. Enough that I'm not too worried about those.
• My one big video folder is empty.
• I see 3 "folder.000s" Numbered 000,001,002, respectively. Some have weird system-y type stuff ($txt, $quota, $objld, dir0000.chk folders, etc.)
• I 'showed hidden folders' and 'showed protected system folders' in order to get at them.
• But folder.001 has about 250 subfolders, different things, but most are dir.#### folders. 0000 through 0240.
• THOSE have video files in them. Most have a few files in them- Video files, .jpgs, folders that are empty, etc.
• But one or two of those have a massive number of video files, it seems like the vast bulk of what's missing.
• My original file structure is, of course, missing.

So here's my PLAN:

• Copy the seemingly good files from my original file structure over to a different hard drive to a recovery folder.
• Go through all the disk0000 folders and copy any files over to the recovery folder
• Run an undelete/recovery program to see if it recovers or finds anything that I missed
• Recover anything that looks like it was deleted/corrupted during this incident (from the disk recovery program)
• (Eventually, lol...) Resort the media files back into the structure they were originally. (Manually recreate it and move stuff around).

Here are my QUESTIONS:

• Is this the best, easiest way to do this?
• I'm assuming that there's no way to recover the original folder structure to then somehow restore it just the way it was, is that correct?
• (If on the chance that a recovery program pulls everything, or most things, back- in the original structure, I would probably recover that way and then delete the recovery folder I already created, above)
• Any particular program good for this? I'm familiar with DiskGenius the most, but not an expert. I'm a little better than a noob, experience wise. I call myself 'advanced user'. User eg- non tech/it person. I no zero coding. For command line stuff I can follow instructions but struggle beyond that to really get what I'm doing.
• (Edit to add this question) - Do you have an opinion on whether, does this situation seem like: 1- All the files will probably be there in the folder.###s , or 2 - Definitely there will probably be some files missing that a disk recovery program may or may not retrieve. I know that nobody can really know for sure. But I get the sense that the files are all safe, just the structure got borked. And I'm just looking for reassurance that this is a potentially accurate read of the situation.

So. What do you think? (And thank you in advance!)

There are several programs that will attempt to put the correct extension on, but I dont know of any that will do the folder structure.

SIW2 said:

There are several programs that will attempt to put the correct extension on, but I dont know of any that will do the folder structure.

Yeah, fair enough. I think I read somewhere that even by using chkdsk it's too late. Something along the lines that chkdsk (maybe with /r?) will relocate all good files, and as it does so will destroy the file structure so that it's lost.

Fortunately I have the file extensions intact. And when I recover further if a file is so far gone it's lost the file ext. I'll probably just let it go.

Thanks for the help-