Lost access to data on hard drive in Windows - how to get access back?

[mark9977]

Hi,

Hope someone can help me.

Something happened to my hard drive, and it ran checkdisk, but I guess could not repair it, it says there is not enough space to repair it. There was about 12gb free on the drive, it was a 500gb drive.

The drive is NFTS.

It is not my boot drive, just one of my 500gb data drives, music actually.

When I ran FileScavenger on the drive all the files are there, and when I recovered some to another drive they were fine. There are 27000 files on it. I could transfer all the files off the drive, but that would be a lot of work, take a lot of time, and I would have to buy another drive to put them on.

So the data is there and intact, just for some reason it cannot be "seen".

I assume this is file structure table thing issue (pardon my technical jargon ) . MBR? FAT? not sure exactly.

Is there a way to rebuild it so that the data can be seen again? or do I have to do the transfer dance?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tmagic650]

You will probably have to do the "transfer" dance, and reformat the drive. Chances are good that the drive is ok. The Master Boot Record (MBR) may be corrupted. There are utilities out there that can repair the MBR without destroying data

 

[JudaZ]

what options did you run chkdsk with? Try booting of a windows XP disk. Choose repair console. Run chkdsk /R.

Just fixed a computer with this. The C partition was just gone. (well it was there but what type of file system on the drive could not be read at all), chkdsk from a bootable xp disk repaired it

(http://www.computerhope.com/chkdskh.htm)