Chkdsk Horrors

Well, as usual it's been a while, but since I'm waiting for a few thousand files to be recovered, I figure I'd share my woes with anyone who just might be having similar issues.

The hard drive in my old computer was failing. Windows occasionally would not boot up properly. I've been pretty good about keeping photos and movies on two, 1 Terra byte external hard drives but failed to do so with everyday "My Documents" kind of things.  I'm going to look into Raid storage now, so that may be a topic for a future post.

Today's post is what to do and better yet, what not to do.

The old computer finally would not boot. Windows repair disk did not work.
After several hours of booting, (or not booting) I finally just took out the hard drive and placed it into my newer computer thinking I would just copy the files.


Easier said than done...

I had to set the BIOS so the computer would boot from the proper hard drive and then had to tell device manager to find the old hard drive I just put in.  Sounds easy enough, but it took a few hours, some Googling and several boot ups to figure all that out.

When my computer and Windows Explorer finally saw the old hard drive, I found out I could not access the various Users folders I needed to get to. Access denied.  Really? Come on!  Upon one of the subsequent boot ups, Windows informed me that the old hard drive had errors and suggested running Chkdsk.  After ignoring that a few times I allowed Windows to do so.

Mistake.

After seeing page after page of "Deleting links to ....." it finally finished.  And so was my old hard drive. There were no files on it and there was 500 Gig free space. There was a folder named Recover.000 with nothing in it. Great.

After a bit more Googling, which I did find one post that said not to do a check disk, I discovered some restore or undelete utilities.

One that I'm using now and I rather like is "Active@ File Recovery".  I downloaded and tried the trial which will find all your deleted files but will only restore files up to 64k.  It worked for me and I purchased it using PayPal for $29.  A bargain.

I've now scanned my old hard drive after making an image copy of it with the same software.  Scanning took about 5 hrs and I can now browse through the scanned image and recover the files I want or need.

There were some glitches.  I first tried a Full scan which probably would've taken a few days. I let it run overnight, only to find my computer had restarted and I lost all the scanning work. I then chose a quicker scan and it did the same thing, but much, much faster.   I then decided to make the disk image and scan that. It would scanning the image just fine, but if I tried to search during the scan things would crash and I'd have to start all over again.  My scan of the original old HDD (not the saved image) worked fine and I've been restoring from that with good success.  I just tried to search for some *.dwg files and it has crashed on me again.   But, I think I now have everything I was looking for.

Thankfully, I've recently been placing most of my things on Google Drive so I don't really have to worry about this anymore. At least not this specifically. Who knows what will happen to Cloud storage over the years?

Best of luck to you if you've stumbled upon this post because you've lost files or messed up a hard drive with chkdsk!

Later,
Lyle.