I have a USB drive with media on it and it was acting flaky so I connected it to a w10 computer and it prompted me to run a scan and fix errors. That took most of the night. This morning the drive is repaired ant the drive is still full but the folder with all the media is gone?
Any ideas how to fix this? I would buy a program if needed.
A lot depends if the sane found bad block if so the drive is on its way out what did it report?
I think the file structure got messed up somehow and the files are still there. I don't recall the specific errors. It was plugged into an Oppo bdp 105d.
Now after w10 scanned and fixed the files are gone. Using Macrium reflect to clone the drive but it is moving fairly quick so I don't think this will uncover the lost files.
@Ghost Rider
Have you finished cloning the drive with Macrium Reflect? Once you have finished, keep that disk aside, plugin only your 4TB WD Elements drive and invoke Disk Management. On it click on View > Top > Disk List. Take a full screenshot
Download and install Hard Disk Sentinel Trial version Hard Disk Sentinel Trial version - HDD health and temperature monitoring . Run it, select your 4TB WD Elements disk and take the screenshot showing its health.
A sample screenshot:
Post the two screenshots.
I shall see it my tomorrow morning , eight hours from now. Your time may then be 20:00 hrs as per your local time shown in your post.
For what its worth I was able to recover 100% of the lost files from backups. I bought a new 4tb drive and I'm coping the files onto it. When I'm done I'll format the drive that failed and copy the files back onto it and plug it back into the Oppo, and see how long it works.
I think the drive will work fine and possibly had something to do with the Oppo, maybe I unplugged it and or powering the drives on or off something got corrupted. Either way if it fails I will have a plugin play backup.
@Ghost Rider
Glad that you already had a backup and therefore do not need to go into data recovery.
The fact is all or most of your files in the 4TB WD is lost. The Master File Table got corrupted. The file index in it was corrupt. The files in it is no longer indexed. If you had seen the disk in Windows Disk Management it would have shown it as RAW but has a drive letter. If you run check disk in that condition, it would delete all the files that are not indexed in MFT. When you said that Check disk ran all night, I guessed that is what could have happened in your disk. Checkdisk vigorously cleaned your disk to remove file system corruption by deleting the non-indexed files. By doing it, it corrected the MFT.. ( When a OP comes here showing a RAW drive with drive letter, I always caution him not to run checkdisk unless TestDisk is run and it confirms that MFT is OK. That would mean the corruption is not in MFT but elsewhere and hence safe to run check disk to repair that file system corruption) Anyway now your disk is clean. All the non-indexed files in MFT have been deleted. MFT is no longer corrupt thanks (? !) to the cleaning action by checkdisk.
Coming to the present, your 4TB WD Elements drive is an Advance Formatted MBR drive and not one initialised as GPT.( Windows Disk Management shows the drive as an MBR drive. Check the disk list in your WDM screenshot.), Initialise it as an MBR drive and do a full format. A full format will write zeroes to all sectors and remap bad sectors if the reserved sectors is not full already.) Keep checking the health of the disk periodically with Hard Disk Sentinel. If bad sectors/weak sectors keep increasing, copy all data to another drive and then discard the disk.
To check the current sector size run the following command in an elevated command prompt ( run as administrator)
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo K: ( change the drive letter K: to the actual drive letter of the drive to be checked)
Sample screenshot of my C: drive:
For your 4TB WD Elements MBR drive the physical sector size will show as 4096. It has been set by the manufacturer to make the MBR drive read more than 2TB disks.
Last edited by jumanji; 27 Feb 2022 at 09:16. Reason: minor corrections
Thanks for your help. Yes it was very comforting when I verified that I did have all the files. On your advice I will get Hard Disk Sentinel and do as you say and check them periodically. I need to organize my backups. The problem is, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8tb drives mostly depending on how old they are, so my backups are on multiple drives and was a little confusing at first.
I will get more drives and redo my backups this time cloning each drive. When making a clone of a drive is it better to simply copy the files or use the Clone disk option in Macrium reflect?
Also I'm not very good with command prompts but when I get back next week I will follow the commands as you indicated.
You may already know this (apologies if you do) but...
Just a thought as to how this type of problem can occur, especially when a removable drive is packed with files. It is important never to simply unplug drives without firstly making sure that it is safe to eject them. This is because any of those files may be used by a running process at the time you pull it out unsafely, and that can cause corruption. The Safe Removal icon is within your System Tray bottom right at the end of the Task Bar. Click it to get the list of devices in use and be sure to select the right one.
Regards,
Christophe
Thanks Christophe,
Yes I always try to do that when using a computer. When you are using the drive(s) in a BD player I generally power off the player then after it has completely turned off I power off the drive(s) adapter(s). Perhaps there have been times I was not able to do it in the proper order. Is there a best practices for powering on the BD player?
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