I NEED to recover corrupted files from a 30 gb USB2 external hard drive. The drive was connected & working with no problem all day, until one time I did a re-boot and when the machine re-booted, the windows 2k message about one of the drives needing to be checked for integrity came up. It appeared to be starting to do the windows 2k integrity check, but it never actually started, the percentage never changed off 0%. I finally shut down the machine after a long period of no action. When I restarted the machine & plugged the external drive back in, no files are visible, although the disk shows that it has approximately 13 gb of data. I ran Norton Disk Doctor, and it found 4,000 plus files, but they are all shown as file fragments & have no extensions or other means of identifying what files or types they are. I then went out & bought IOIO’s Search & Recover. However, when I ran the program, it did not find any files, When I ran the advanced file search, after unchecking the box to hide folders that aren’t deleted it did “see” the 2 FOUND folders from the previous attempt to recover data but none of the other “data”. I was able to use that program on a couple of jump drives & did recover some deleted data from them, so the program does work to some extent. I also tried running the program against another hard drive that had previously contained most of the same data, but which has since been re-formatted & partially reloaded. Although the program says it can recover files under those circumstances, it didn’t find any of those documents. The original computer was running Win2k Pro & all drives were / are formatted as FAT32.
Suggestions?