[Shikaru]

Seeing as I've got no real tech-savvy friends, I'm turning to you guys as there's a lot of knowledgeable folks here. Recently I loaded up my recording comp and tried to open a file through reason off my dedicated audio drive, and the computer crashed randomly. I did a manual reset as it wasn't responding, and upon loading again it started checking the drive for errors. This was fine, but it started scanning one folder full of some recording I've been doing recently (the folder I was trying to access a file from), and it hung there for a while, then the computer just randomly resets. This time when it loads it says there's no drive connected there (The SATA connections on my motherboard don't seem entirely solid).

So after I checked the connections inside I booted again and the drive was showing up fine, but the folder it had been scanning when the error checking crashed is gone. I ran the disk error checking utility thing, and after a long wait it just said it was done and that was it. Still no folder. Now I figured it was gone forever, but I was analyzing the drive in disk defragmenter, and noticed it analyzed one of the files in that folder, so I guess it's still there.

Now I'm wondering if there's any way to get it back? I hopefully have a backup somewhere, but even then I don't like the idea of all those files sitting there taking up space. Any advice is greatly appreciated . I'm running windows XP SP2, by the way.

[Chris]

Sounds like a File Allocation Table crash, and if so you could be SOL. The thing is, usually FAT crashes effect the whole disk, not just parts of it.

The folder it was scanning is completely gone?

[Shikaru]

Yep, just disappeared. I guess it's not a huge deal if it's unrecoverable, just a gig or two of space I can't use I guess.

[JJ Rodriguez]

Get a program like Get data back, and scan the drive, might be able to grab them that way.

[Shikaru]

I grabbed the demo of Get data back, and a free recovery tool, so I'll give em a shot tomorrow when I have the time to scan the whole disk (said it was gonna take about 2 hours). I'll post back after I do the scan with the results.

[Rev2010]

Boot into Safe Mode and go into a command window. If you don't know what that means click Start -> then click Run - then type CMD and hit Enter. When the black DOS window appears type chkdsk /f /r and hit Enter. This does a complete scandisk with full check and recovery. After that's done if the folder still doesn't show, like Chris said, you may be SOL. I use a bootable CD OS called ERD Commander or Bart PE which allows me to work on the main drive but if you don't have all these tools and shit it could be a hard to recover from situation. Best of luck


Rev.

[Shikaru]

Just running chkdsk now, it's verifying file data apparently and has been sitting about 0% for 5 mins or so now . I'm guessing it's gonna take a while as it's a 250 gig drive. Gonna leave it on overnight and hopefully it'll be done by the morning.

Thanks for the help Chris, JJ and Rev +Rep for you guys.