HEEEELP, Win XP/FAT32 file recovery.

[T-Bird]

Hi all computer geniuses .

Being a Plug Play sorta fellow, I just didn't know better and didn't reformat my 500G external to NTFS.

NOW THAT WAS STUPID, I know, and as can be expected there was a write error and now the data is, well, unaccessible to say the least .

There's nothing that important, just a lot of ST TOS, DS9 and Voyager, accompanied by Galactica and Lost I have downloaded with my 512/512 over a while. As I've found the wonders of e-mule .

The data still seems to be there, but the directory structure is totally shot. Nothing is accessible (shouldn't have tried I know now), and the file and directory names with those symbols are far beyond my knowledge of any language in existence.

Anyone knows a good reliable way/software to make the files accessible again? I can rename the files if necessary.

I'm not a computer nerd, what a surprise there , so I'll need good instructions also how to do the recovery process.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards.
Sam

[Humblerumble]

Easiest thing may be to put the hard drive in another computer as a slave and try to access the data that way.

[john turner]

connect it to your computer, go into control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management. it should show up as one of your drives, and you should be able to change the format from fat32 to ntfs, and it should do so without destroying the data on the disk, iirc. i've done that kind of thing before and i seem to remember it working, but it's been a long time. at the very least, it will prompt you that the data will be lost if you do this, then you can at least choose to do it if you wish, or not to.

[lbanks]

Try right-clicking on the drive icon, bring up properties>tools>error-checking>check now. Allow it to fix system/all errors. This may take a while and if the disk is damaged may not work. It may ask to reboot, allow it. Allow it to convert lost clusters. If that works, then convert the drive to HPFS. However, if you have one of these stupid WD Mybook, it may not let you, depending on the model.

[T-Bird]

Hi.

Thanks guys.

Originally Posted by Humblerumble

Easiest thing may be to put the hard drive in another computer as a slave and try to access the data that way.

That doesn't work, tried with three different computers and as MS products constantly write into the HDD it's said to be destructive for the "lost" data, which is obvious.

Originally Posted by john turner

connect it to your computer, go into control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management. it should show up as one of your drives, and you should be able to change the format from fat32 to ntfs, and it should do so without destroying the data on the disk, iirc. i've done that kind of thing before and i seem to remember it working, but it's been a long time. at the very least, it will prompt you that the data will be lost if you do this, then you can at least choose to do it if you wish, or not to.

I did that a while ago for other reasons (a handheld device)and all the data was lost on that drive. Unfortunately the same goes for all the Win system tools.

As it happens our good friends at Google have put some ads on these pages, ads that are triggered by the certain keywords in the text . I have to look at those products. A few of those I've already checked, either expensive or for different kind of data loss.

The stupid thing is that I knew the shortcomings of large FAT32 discs and automatically assumed that all the new USB HDDs' are formatted as NTFS. Didn't even check .
A friend of mine (who couldn't help) gave a good explanation: Using FAT32, the manufacturer can advertise the drive being compatible from win95 upwards. Needless to say I reformatted the replacement disk ASAP.

I'm in no hurry, so if someone else has any tips, feel free to chime in.

Regards
Sam

[T-Bird]

Hi.

A bit of an update.

Using Active@ undelete, I was able to scan the disk. Took 16 hours to do that .

I was also able to recover most of the files (took an additional 5 hours ), sort of....

All the files have a generated file name now, all the original file names were lost. No biggie, can do that by hand.

Had to use a VLC media player to view those avi's and to my surprise almost all of them have from 5 to 15 minutes cut off in the end of the video file. Now that wasn't what I expected at all . The file sizes are correct though.

Bottom line, I'm quite back where I started, so if anyone has any other suggestions .....

Regards
Sam

[heroincredible]

Originally Posted by T-Bird

There's nothing that important, just a lot of ST TOS, DS9 and Voyager, accompanied by Galactica and Lost I have downloaded with my 512/512 over a while. As I've found the wonders of e-mule .

No love for TNG? Never did get into Voyager.

Sorry for the OT.

[T-Bird]

Hi.

Originally Posted by heroincredible

No love for TNG? Never did get into Voyager.

Sorry for the OT.

Actually quite a lot of love for TNG, I've had those DVD boxes for ages .

On top of that I even have the STTNG pinball .

Now how nerdy is that?

Regards
Sam