Hard drive appears empty

[Rondog]

Hard drive appears empty when you open it, but cannot see any files.

Any thoughts on how to fix it WITHOUT a format?

[bonesaw]

vista misplaced 141 gigs? man i've never seen anything like that. did it just happened one day or did you add more drives or something?

[PorPorMe]

Originally Posted by Rondog

Hard drive appears empty when you open it, but cannot see any files.

Any thoughts on how to fix it WITHOUT a format?

Depends on what has happend or what you have done. It didn't just happen by itself sitting in the moonlight.

my guess [only a guess because you have given no information] is that something has changed, altered, corrupted the master boot sector of that drive. Don't act on this. It is where I would start to investigate if i was as ignorant about what has happend.

what were you doing? It might have been right then but it might have been a day or two ago. try to remember the last time that drive worked. then try to think about what you have done, what program you might have used that might have that kind of access to your HD-not many do-Major HD utilities for the most part. And there is always the posibility of one nasty bug. You are in a lot of dodo if you've got one that mean!
On second thought-unless you know you used a HD utility, I think maybe you should start a bug run first. If you have a bug that is nasty enough to do that, it's probly not going to be easy. Run everythng yo have and then go to:
Adware ,Spyware,Virus and Firewall Info
In any case-give some mor info so the right person with the right knowlege can give you the best help.
I'm just shooting in the dark.
Post more info. do as a complete a bug hunt as you can-that never hurt anything! and you'll get more help. Can't beat that with a stick!

[Áedán]

Did the drive have data on it previously? (If it did, do you want the data back?) What file system is the drive formatted with? (Presume NTFS?)

Do you get the same view from a command line prompt?

[PorPorMe]

Originally Posted by Áedán

Did the drive have data on it previously? (If it did, do you want the data back?) What file system is the drive formatted with? (Presume NTFS?)

Do you get the same view from a command line prompt?

I'd like to know your thinking here and I'm not being sarcastic!
By his statement, all of a sudden, he can't read the data on it and does not want to format, in hopes of getting the data back, I'd guess. That is what I am hearing.
So why the questions about did the drive have data? and does he want it back? and what file system as he was seeing the data at some point previously?

The last one got me thinking. what would be the reason the data would only be seen at the cmd prompt? you must know something else but the only thing I can come up with is you're going down the road of Fat and NTSF but that doesn't make any sencse to me.
I'd apreaceate what you are after and where you are going.

[Necorum]

just had this happen to me a while back. I need more info before i suggest anything.

[Rondog]

The drive is from a notebook. Using notebook happily bla bla bla, turn it off one night when finished, turn it on the next day and it doesnt boot to Windows. Plug it into my desktop machine, and the drive appears thus.

It was NTFS with a Vista Home Basic install on it.

Ran Recover My Files across it, its been going just on 20 hours and I think I should be able to recover most of the music and photos, still curious as to what the hell happened though.

Tried chkdsk /r to no avail, just gives an error message saying not enough free space on disk to recover files.

Should I image the drive to a larger one then attempt a chkdsk? Does anyone think it'll work?

[noob]

Probably one of the easier things to do would be to boot into a *nix distro and see if you can read it there. You may be able to drag the files off and then format it clean.

If the partition info has gotten corrupt, and linux cant read it, there are tools out there that can fix that, without a format. They will take about 2hrs on a disk of that size.

If the partition info had gotten corrupt, essentially check disk will make a copy of every file at the same time it fixes the partition info, and copies it back to the original, essentially needing a little more space than what data is already on there.

[Áedán]

Originally Posted by PorPorMe

I'd like to know your thinking here and I'm not being sarcastic!

I was trying to confirm that there was data that he wanted, as I was in a little bit of a hurry when I read it.

The question about NTFS was due to the fact that NTFS is a lot more resilient to damage than FAT is, as information about the files is spread out over the disk, rather than concentrated near the beginning of the disk.

[PorPorMe]

Originally Posted by Áedán

I was trying to confirm that there was data that he wanted, as I was in a little bit of a hurry when I read it.

The question about NTFS was due to the fact that NTFS is a lot more resilient to damage than FAT is, as information about the files is spread out over the disk, rather than concentrated near the beginning of the disk.

OK, I thought it was that you had miss read his post or you had an idea that most didn't know about. I was hopeing the latter!

and if he has hyrems boot disk or any other disk repair or rescue disk -,he can probly get it back. I'm hearing he didn't do anything and booted in the morning and there it was. "IF" that is the case, a bug chase is in order. a big one. It doesn't cost any thing or hurt any thing and he will find others even if there isn't one causeing this. But Even if he finds afix, if it was me, I'd never trust that I didn't hae a big bug sitting in there waiting.

[Necorum]

Ive had it happen out of the blue for no reason before so meh Im doubting a bug. Improper shutdown, semi flakey hd (Bad sectors on the hard drive), bad partition, Corrupt file allocation table, anything could be the culprit.

[Rondog]

Managed to recover about 90gb which is enough for now. Ordered a 250gb hard drive, will image it across and run a chkdsk, we'll see how it goes.

[noob]

All something like this takes to happen is windows to be writting to the partition table, or the file information, and not finish before it shuts down. This seems to be more of the partition table, due to the fact that you cant read any of it.

[Rondog]

Didnt work, hard drive is toast. Rebuilt the machine, was lucky I was able to recover the data beforehand.

Thanks for your input guys.

[ShawnP]

I just had this happen to the second partition on a raid. The first partition is for boot and I reinstalled the op system, win7. Finished, opened up partition, (because it showed in my computer that part or the partition was filled, so I assumed my files survived) and nothing there.

I am starting to deal with hard drives a lot more because of my business, HD cameras.

So I am going to try one of the two programs and see which one works:
Hard Disk Mechanic
Active Partition Recovery

[Áedán]

Ontrack's EasyRecovery Professional is meant to be pretty good too.