HELP!: Drive is good but all files just disappeared!!

[fongaboo]

OK I have 120gig Western Digital JB1200 IDE drive in an ADS External Firewire case. It was formatted FAT32. It's worked flawlessly on either of my PC's (one running XPpro, the other Me) for months, as well as the Macs at school. I
brought it home from class tonight and plugged it into my Me machine along with a new Firewire camera. Me prompted for drivers for the camera to be installed but I cancelled. When I opened up a project on the drive, it blue screened but I came back enough to shut down properly. When I
rebooted, somehow Norton DiskDoctor wanted to scan the drive. I cancelled it. When I opened the drive, it showed to be empty. I rebooted one more time. This time it wanted to scan again, but showed the drive as 'Local Disk' instead of its actual label. Now it only showed a _Restore directory.
I plugged it into my XPpro machine and rebooted. When it rebooted XP wanted to do its integrity check. It showed that the thing is now empty. When I booted again it had created RECYCLED and SYSTEM VOLUME INFORMATION directories.

ALL OF MY VIDEO PROJECTS FOR SCHOOL WERE ON THAT DRIVE. I had recently backed the most important ones up to a three-disk 90 gig RAID I had set to span. But lucky me, *that* is booting up showing 'Broken Span' on the first
and third disks. It's an Highpoint RAID controller.

Any idea on what went wrong here? And how I can recover it?. Western Digital offers no help because they have me run their drive diagnostic which says the drive is fine. They care not that all of my work from the past year completely disappeared, but only whether there is a physical problem with the drive?

 

[Willy2782]

Have you tried any software to try to recover the data ?

 

[roamer1]

fongaboo,

Might be several different things, If it doesn't read in ANY of the machines it used to, the problem must be in the cable, the HDD case, or the HDD itself.

I would remove the HDD from the external case and set it up to plug directly into the motherboard, boot to DOS and see if you can access the drive. If not, Fdisk from a boot disk, and see what that tells ya.

'Coupla things to try depending on results, so write back.

 

[prajapat]

From the information provided:
1. The first time you got the HDD bad, most probably the partition table was bad to the worst case to be corrupted boot sector and first few MBs (done by popular virus CIH).
2. After Win XP wrote onto it you may have lost some more area.
3. You should try good data recovery software like Easy recovery and should be able to get most of the data even after FAT is corrupt. You may download the trial version from

http://www.ontrack.com

and see the recoverable files (can't write to other disk)
4. Don't forget to disble any software protecting the deleted files like Norton Protection for recycle Bin before trying on the HDD and similar features of Win XP.

If your files are not fragmented, there is good chance to get them back.

Best of the luck

Chetan

 

[kshugart]

fongaboo,

DONOT do what the previous responses told you to do, they will corrupt your data beyond repair.

The key.
You wrote "It's worked flawlessly on either of my PC's (one running XPpro, the other Me) for months, as well as the Macs at school..." this is your problem; the mac's at school.
When you attached it to the MacIntosh, and it changed the file system type where neither a windows or a MAC can read it.

This can be reversed without too much problem, if nothing else was done or attempted that would complicate recovery.

The more attempts from would be data recovery experts will only complicate matters.

We have have done several of these type of recoveries with 100% success. Klon Shugart
Data Recovery Specialist
Microsoft Certified/ mcp 2000

http://www.adv-data.com