External Hard Drive - Data Corrupted

Question

I have a Maxtor 500gb externally powered USB hard drive.

Overnight a lot of the files became corrupt on the drive, upon restart of the computer a ChkDsk was automatically started on the drive.

The ChkDsk found a lot of corrupted files and 'orphaned files' which in turn were automatically recovered, according to the ChkDsk.

Now when accessing the files it seems as if the data contained in the files has been mumbled. E.g. open a song in WMP and it plays 20 seconds of a movie which is located somewhere else on the drive.

It is as if all the files on the hard drive now point to incorrect data.

Can anyone explain what is happening?

Recovery software does not seem to pick up that the data is wrong.

Thankyou for any assistance

Answer 1

corrupt data means corrupt data. if the harddrive is not physically damaged (which we can not be sure of) the best thing you can do is to create a complete snapshot of that disk and do the analysis of the dump somewhere else.

do not try to do anything with the suspicious disk until you have analysed the dump. using the disk might get things worse.

depending on how valuable the data on that disk is: consider buying knowledge from specialists in the data recovery area.

again: make a dump if the disk seems physically ok (eg: no strange sounds from the disk; you do not want to make things worse by letting the pladders rotate at high speed near the head if 'something' is wrong) and analyse the dump.