I may have been wise to keep checking back for more replies over the past 24 hours -- particularly the posts about not messing with the drive without at least cloning first -- or just punting to a recovery specialist. FWIW, the drive is in a storage box -- not to be trifled with again by me without a VERY solid understanding of what's happening, and how to recover -- if that's still even possible at this point. The shame and regret of getting to this -- very avoidable -- point with my data won't be soon forgotten.
- And yes, you seem to have bolted the stable after the horses themselves have bolted
First: the data is critical, and it hasn't been backed up in years. Yes, I've been an idiot.
- Haste makes waste.
Things seemed to take a turn for the better today as I continued to research solutions: the more I diagnosed, the more I began to conclude the drive may not have gone bad -- it may have been more attributable to my directory system or Windows itself: I kept getting a "D:/ drive is not accessible, the parameter is incorrect." In the USB dock, Disk Management reported the disk with an active partition -- but with 100% of the space available -- as if I had no data on the disk. (frightening) Upon the advice of one website for the "parameter incorrect" error message, I ran a CHKDSK at boot up and -- presto -- the D drive "reappeared" in Explorer, Device Manager and Disk Management -- with the drive connected via the USB dock or per the original internal installation on the motherboard. (When all this started, I couldn't even see the drive letter with the HDD SATA-connected to the MB.) After trying a system restore -- which reported as being unsuccessful afterward -- I could actually open the D drive in explorer and see my folders! See "D-Drive Folders" screen capture, attached. But . . . there were some mystery folders on the root directory that weren't there before. Worse, the only files that seem to have survived are my music files. The all-important 'Documents' and 'Pictures' folders are EMPTY. Since the total amount of data on the drive seems unchanged from when this disaster started this week, I had to ask, "where's the data?" Then I opened one of the mystery folders -- the one at the upper left -- and found DOZENS of large, equally-sized files with no extension name. See "D Drive Mystery Folder" screen shot, also attached. I can only speculate that this is where all my unrecovered data is residing. The impression I'm getting is that my entire file/folder/directory system was altered by CHKDISK to get me access to the drive -- at the expense of access to most of my data.
- If my suspicion that the MFT in the disk could have been corrupt is correct, running check disk would have completely wiped out all data that might not have been indexed properly in the Master File Table ( due to corrupt MFT).But then it would have put the deleted files in folders found.000 and the like. I honestly do not understand the creation of the mystery folder.I would elicit the opinions from other Windows 10 experts. To that end please post the chechdisk log,.
Read Chkdsk Log in Event Viewer in Windows 10
I am obviously a great danger to my own interests here. Years of work, vital records and photographic memories are on the line. If anyone has any insights on what's going on, where I likely stand at this point, best courses of action -- believe me -- I'm all ears. I'm definitely done tinkering.
- @ Marie SWE I would elicit your opinion whether professional data recovery would help at this stage.