CHKDSK made it worse

[ceagle]

Just so you know... (so maybe it doesn't need to happen to you)

Something I don't think I've seen before: On a flashdrive, I opened a folder to see that most of the names of files were jumbled into some crazed mess.. not all of them.. maybe half... perhaps because of some unicode or utf issue?

Not sure... but I took the thumbdrive to another machine... pretty much the same thing there.

So I fired up the ole CHKDSK whish is supposed to FIX drive errors.... what does it do? IT ELIMINATED THE ENTIRE FOLDER.

*facepalms*

I do have a backup, although not too recent, and not sure exactly where it is... so I probably did lose some things in that folder (help apps for customers, so no personal data, luckily).

Also wondering if the flashdrive is on its way out... but no integrity errors were found :|

Be careful out there...

Comments

[rustyfox.livejournal.com]

Photorec is a pretty good file recovery tool, whatever chkdsk did, there was already some corruption, but data should still be there in some shape or other. If it is, photorec will probably recover that which is recoverable.

In these "uh-oh, it's all gone wrong!" disk failure scenarios I always dd the entire disk to an image first, before running any tool that'll alter its state forever.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Wowzersw.. thank yooooooo....... I will have to look that one up! One of the machines we have which I was trying to use for recovery has two programs we've had success with (Recuva and Glary Undelete) ... I tried the Glary and it could only locate about 9 files from that folder victimized by deletion. It got late and I did not try the Recuva yet, ... but perhaps I should lookup Photorec next! *hugz*