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I have a lot of files on a 128GB USB stick to transfer between computers. I've been updating the the stick regularly but manually. Last time I did this I was going to copy from the stick to my main PC under Ubuntu but the directory structure and files are now all messed up - difficult to describe, see the pics. I tried in Windows but the files are still a mess. I tried to the repair the stick with Windows GUI method and then chkdsk but no faults were found, even though there clearly is a fault.

Here is what the structure should look like:

The directory structure should look like this

Here are a few samples of what the root looks like now:

Messed up directory structure 1

Messed up directory structure 2

That's 255 folders with nonsense in them. There are then still some valid folders but they shouldn't be in the root.

Messed up files

And there are 16661 of these messed up files. There are many other files in the root but they shouldn't be there, they should be deeper in the directory structure.

I searched all over stackexchange and the web in general but couldn't find any other example of this. To me it looks like the "file allocation table" got corrupt but still works, somehow. Does ExFAT have a backup FAT I can use a cmd-line utility to point to? Under Windows or Linux?

There are approximately one week's of files I am missing, but it's an important week (it always is, isn't it?!).

Thanks 🙂

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    I removed the reference to backup - if it's only in one place, it's not a backup. Note you should never use chkdsk to try fix important data. chkdsk doesn't give a monkey's about your data. It will sacrifice any & all data to do its job… fix the disk structure.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 21, 2021 at 9:14
  • Hi Tesujin. Okay, I meant backup in the sense of backup file allocation table, not backup of data. Good point on chkdsk, but my reason was to fix the disk/filesystem, not the files. Any suggestions on restoring a correct file allocation table? Any idea what I would call this weird limbo state where it's readable but clearly a mess?
    – madbilly
    Jul 22, 2021 at 10:17
  • Whatever happened to it, the tables are confirmed 'fixed'. The trouble is, though you can see it's pooched, the OS doesn't think it is. It doesn't make the same value judgments, unfortunately. It doesn't know what it ought to have been like. idk whether testdisk, photorec etc would make better sense of it. Might be safer to dd to another drive & work on that.
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 22, 2021 at 10:29

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