Hi all, I'm hoping someone can give me some help or advice regarding data recovery please?
In essence I have about 330GB of corrupted/damaged data on a 3TB hard disk, the remainder of which is almost full with healthy data. The healthy data is backed up, the corrupted data is not, hence the need to recover.
The key advice I need is how best to do this? For example, should I delete the healthy data from the drive (as I suspect free space on the drive will make the recovery process easier) or could this make the corrupted data worse? What method or tool should I use to attempt to recover (windows wants to run check disk on boot, so that is one option, a friend has recommended Piriform's Recuva).
To explain the full story as to how I got into this position:
My PC was having some booting issues, and so it had been recommended to me to format all drives and reinstall windows. This I did, initially with no problems. All data was moved onto the (newly purchased) 3TB drive (which was/is approx 94% full), while all other drives were formatted. I don't know exactly what happened to cause the data corruption, the only thing I did to the drive around the time I noticed the data was corrupted was reassigned the drive letter. I was also installing windows updates at the time.
Windows updates finished and recommended a restart, which I did, and during the restart process windows launched check disk on the drive. It initially uncovered indexing errors, and so I left it running overnight. It continued to run for 48 hours, at which time the messages on the screen were saying that it was trying to move "orphaned files" but that there was insufficient disk space to do so. On the recommendation of a friend I switched off the PC before this process had finished, disconnected the drive and rebooted.
Everything else on the PC is fine, and once I plugged the drive back in, I could see that the majority of the data remained healthy (and I have since copied all the healthy data.)
I realise I have committed the schoolboy error of not backing up my data!
I am more than happy to provide any further information if I have missed anything, etc.
Thanks in advance to anyone who is able to help!
In essence I have about 330GB of corrupted/damaged data on a 3TB hard disk, the remainder of which is almost full with healthy data. The healthy data is backed up, the corrupted data is not, hence the need to recover.
The key advice I need is how best to do this? For example, should I delete the healthy data from the drive (as I suspect free space on the drive will make the recovery process easier) or could this make the corrupted data worse? What method or tool should I use to attempt to recover (windows wants to run check disk on boot, so that is one option, a friend has recommended Piriform's Recuva).
To explain the full story as to how I got into this position:
My PC was having some booting issues, and so it had been recommended to me to format all drives and reinstall windows. This I did, initially with no problems. All data was moved onto the (newly purchased) 3TB drive (which was/is approx 94% full), while all other drives were formatted. I don't know exactly what happened to cause the data corruption, the only thing I did to the drive around the time I noticed the data was corrupted was reassigned the drive letter. I was also installing windows updates at the time.
Windows updates finished and recommended a restart, which I did, and during the restart process windows launched check disk on the drive. It initially uncovered indexing errors, and so I left it running overnight. It continued to run for 48 hours, at which time the messages on the screen were saying that it was trying to move "orphaned files" but that there was insufficient disk space to do so. On the recommendation of a friend I switched off the PC before this process had finished, disconnected the drive and rebooted.
Everything else on the PC is fine, and once I plugged the drive back in, I could see that the majority of the data remained healthy (and I have since copied all the healthy data.)
I realise I have committed the schoolboy error of not backing up my data!
I am more than happy to provide any further information if I have missed anything, etc.
Thanks in advance to anyone who is able to help!
