Can I recover my files from a USB hard drive? I don't see any files, but half the disk space is gone.

Question

I have a 500 GB USB drive. Whether I go to Windows Explorer or Finder, the drive shows that about half the drive is free. However, when I open the drive in either Windows 7 or OS X, no files show up. I have also tried to look at the files through the command line, but I don't see any.

A while back, I hooked it up to my MacBook Pro and there was a quick message that said the drive was not ejected properly. I did not read the message and hit OK.

It there any way to get those files back from the drive?

Answer 1

In either Windows or OS X verify the partition information for the drive.

In Windows 7:

• Right Click "Computer" and then click on "Manage".
• Once the Computer Management window opens select Disk Management from under the "Storage" header.
• This should show you the partition information for any connected drives. It will be good to note if it shows the full size of the drive being used.

In OS X:

• Open Applications folder in Finder and go to the Utilities directory and open Disk Utility (or press CMD+Space and type in Disk Utility to open it from Spotlight).
• Select the USB connected drive and you should see the partition information here as well.

Verifying that the partition information is correct will help determine the next step.

If you are expecting there to be files and they aren't appearing, you can try to use the Windows software Recuva to recover files. If you aren't missing data but just working out a drive space issue, then reformatting/repartitioning the drive should help get your space back to normal. Formatting and partitioning can be done from either of the previously mentioned programs (Computer Management -> Disk Management in Win7/WinXP or Disk Utility in OS X).

Answer 2

If a Unix machine, you could run fsck to check and repair a partition. On the Mac, the Disk Utility has a "Verify Disk" button that you can use to check the disk and a "Repair Disk" button that you can use to repair any inconsistencies on the disk. I'm not sure, but most likely those two buttons use "fsck" to do most or all of the work.

In windows there is a checkdsk utility that does about the same thing.

Answer 3

1. Your missing files, probably a damaged table from a poorly timed dismount. My suggestion: use a data carving tool to recover the data off the drive. PC inspector is free and I've used it before: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinspector.html Alternatively you can obtain something more powerful like AccessData.

2. Recovering that lost space. once your data is recovered and off the drive... blow the drive away. quick and easy: click start, right click my computer, click manage, click disk manager, click your usb drive, delete the partitions, create a new partition using 100% of the space.

3. Keep it from happening again. Kinda vague on my instructions here, but basically you right click that new volume on your usb disk, properties of it and there should be a tab that is unique to USB removable drives. That tab has some options to basically "make this volume run faster- but there will be he11 to pay for yanking it out" - you are going to click the one that says "Run a little slower but be prepared to be randomly ejected from the computer".

Also, it wouldn't hurt to run one of those check disk tools against it to make sure the physical disk wasn't the cause of the problem.