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Old hard drive question

Discussion in 'Computers & Technology Forum' started by HeDied4U, Sep 2, 2010.

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  1. HeDied4U

    HeDied4U Well-Known Member
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    About 4 years ago I had a computer die on me. Before disposing of it I removed the hard drive from it to use as an external back-up. It was a 60GB hard drive, and when the pc died, I had about 25GB worth of free space. Used it for a few years, storing new stuff and deleting old.

    About a year and a half ago, I bought a 500GB external drive to use a back up, and stored the other one away. Yesterday I was looking for a few files that I knew were on the 60GB drive, but when I went to find them, it seemed like a lot of stuff was missing. When I clicked on properties for the drive, it was showing around 10GB total drive space with about 3GB actually available.

    Now for my question....are the missing files (and drive space) gone, hidden in some way, or has time and inactivity damaged the drive in some way? I racked my brain trying all the tricks I know (which I'll admit aren't many) but came up empty.

    If anyone could help shed some light on this problem, I would definitely appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
     
    #1 HeDied4U, Sep 2, 2010
  2. Don

    Don Well-Known Member
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    I'm only guessing - but it sounds like the hard drive has been bounced around, and isn't reading some of the sectors.

    You can try taking it to Best Buy or a local computer shop, and see if they can do a hard drive restore, or at least restore some of the partitions and/or data; or you can try it yourself, using something like this:
    http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1139&page=8
     
    #2 Don, Sep 3, 2010
  3. Trotter

    Trotter <img src =/6412.jpg>

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    Hook it back up via external and run CHKDSK on it (Windows, of course).

    If you are using Windows 7, open Computer > Rt-click Drive > Properties > Tools tab > Check Now. Here you have options to Automatically Fix File System Errors and Scan For And Attempt Recovery Of Bad Sectors. You may have to schedule the chkdsk at reboot, if the drive to be checked, is in use.

    Or you can use the command line version (no matter which version you have). Open a CMD window (as Administrator if in Vista or 7). Type in "CHKDSK <volume> /F /R" (be sure to include the spaces). This would tell it to perform a full scan, repair and bad sectors, and attempt to recover any data in those sectors.

    I have used this to recover a drive from a laptop that was completely unbootable and unreadable. It took a while to completely scan and fix, but it saved the entire drive.
     
    #3 Trotter, Sep 4, 2010
  4. HeDied4U

    HeDied4U Well-Known Member
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    CHKDSK seems to have done the trick.

    As far as I can tell, everything now seems to be accessible, and I found the files I was looking for.

    Thanks Trotter. I appreciate the help.

    :)
     
    #4 HeDied4U, Sep 7, 2010
  5. Trotter

    Trotter <img src =/6412.jpg>

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    No problem. Glad to help.
     
    #5 Trotter, Sep 7, 2010
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