Recovering data from an external hard drive
- by CCallaghan
I have a WD Elements 2GB hard drive (formatted NTFS). I accidentally kicked out the USB cable while writing data to the disk, and now I can't access most of the data. Although this was ostensibly my backup drive, there is a great deal of important material on there which was only on there. I realise how idiotic this makes me. (So, formatting is not an option.)
Things I've tried/information I've gathered:
Windows Explorer will recognise the drive itself. However, it will not access most directories therein (and will sometimes crash when exploring). I can access all of the directories through the command line, but the dir command will often report that it can't read any files in most of the directories. The situation was similar when I hooked it up to an Ubuntu machine: the file explorer crashed, but I could access directories - but not files in those directories - via terminal commands. Several files I tried to copy out either resulted in an I/O error being reported or resulted in the command line crashing.
The Disk Management utility on Windows reports a healthy disk formatted as NTFS and not RAW. It also indicates the correct amount of space used up and its capacity (so it seems that the files are not deleted).
I've tried to run chkdsk, but that hangs on Step 2 (checking indexes) at 74%. Step 1 reported no bad sectors.
I tried Recuva, but that didn't seem to work (stalled at 0% for half an hour).
I should also note that the disk doesn't seem to be spinning smoothly; it seems to be chopping back, like it's reading the same sector over and over again. I noticed this after I kicked out the cable.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Update: It would seem the problem has taken a turn for the worse. The external hard drive now shows up on my computer as a local disk and is not mountable by Linux.
