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

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Very interesting reading... thanks for the link! *wingfuzzles your ears* ... Indeed, I know they do act and react differently sometimes, although I am not 100% versed in the varieties, alas.. ;P .... I just took a chance with it, and in retrospect I should have stepped more methodically and patiently like I do with customers' gear... *sigh*

It caught me at a bad time at work, and I was feeling rushed.. and also shocked to see something I had not encountered all these years. I knew the computer I was on did not have full language support, so I had wondered if that was it, which is why I tried it on another one that does. As Rusty (above) said wisely, I should have made a backup then and there before proceeding...

If you should also run across an article entitled "How_to_restore_a_flash_device", do send that along too... ^v^

[hastka.livejournal.com]

Hah yeah, I was hoping the article name was not overly direct. :)

I will keep my eyes open. :) But I think the answer is to see about finding flash-aware utilities. Searching around for "flash drive recovery tools" yielded these for example, but I'm sure that's just the tip of that iceberg.

SSD recovery would probably be another good buzzword that I didn't look into. Again, apologies if I'm restating the obvious here, but sometimes the "extra set of eyes" is of value. :)

Anyway, good luck on resolving it. I somewhat know what you're going through, as I had the microSD card in my phone crash a few months ago, and didn't realize it until the corruption was, well, let's just say widespread. Bye-bye images, music, etc. I had an older backup too... but....