I keep my documents and other data on a Samsung 500 GB portable disc, which I back up from time to time on a 5 TB desktop disc, along with the contents of two other large-capacity portable hard discs. At some point in the course of shutting down my computer one night and starting it up the next day, the identity and contents of the disc disappeared. Although it was still recognised as a drive in both Windows Explorer and Directory Opus (which I use normally), when I attempted to show a file list I merely got an error messagestating that the disc was unreadable. The results were identical when I connected the disc to a different computer.
When I examined the properties of the disc, it came up as having 0 bytes of free space and 0 bytes of used space.
In order to regain any kind of access to the disc, I did a quick format, after which an empty file list could be displayed in
After running Recuva in 'deep scan' mode (which took many hours), I got a list of about 14,000+ files, a number of them shown as having 'excellent' prospects for recovery with no overwritten clusters detected. Fortunately, I only needed to recover the few files I had stored since the latest back-up, but when I marked them (Screengrab1) and clicked on the 'Recover' button, all failed, in each case because 'The system cannot find the file specified' (Screengrab2), even though the number of clusters and their location is shown in the 'info' sidebar. However, for all of these failed files the 'header' sidebar shows strings of 00s.
Is there anything more that I can do to get these files back? And, whether or not that is possible, could the disc be wiped and re-used or should it just be thrown out as being too risky? (As far as I can tell it is not physically damaged in any way.) The present properties of the disc are given in Screengrab3.
Alex.
