Hard Drive wiped out I think.. Heart Broken! Help!

[siratfus]

246 GB left and still going. I'm grateful that my files seemed to have been recovered. But man, this is not ideal. I will have to sort through the real files versus the deleted files. And to sort through all this without dates since all that info is gone.

Does anybody know of a program that will recover dates as well?

[lweight]

Are both Modified date and Created date changed?

There is a powershell function that can set Modified date to Created date, but it assumes Created date is the original date:
Get-ChildItem -recurse | % { $_.LastWriteTime = $_.CreationTime }

If both modified date and created dates are changed, the next possible option is to use Irfanview to add EXIF date to the filename.

[Mephesto]

Also, is it possible to get back the original dates of the pictures? I see all that info is gone, replaced by current date.

If the Master File Table was damaged then your filesystem timestamps are gone but the original timestamps of the picture should be inside the EXIF metadata.

[Nelson37]

Dates will probably be lost, time involved can easily run into 48 hours.

Not familiar with that particular program and have never seen one that created recovery files larger than the original disk. If it is not correcting for clusters on the hard drive being claimed by more than one file, then it is not doing a very good job, won't give a very good recovery, and the potential space required can be nearly unlimited.

I will repeat that doing drive recovery thru the un-needed secondary USB interface is something that NO qualified technician would ever attempt or recommend. If removing the drive required destroying the housing, as some do, that would be done. It is a very high probability that a failure of the secondary interface is the cause of the problem. It is an absolute certainty that the secondary interface is not needed to access the drive, also a certainty that it complicates and adds another layer of translation to any drive access.

The interface is probably doubling, at least, the time required to perform the recovery. It is almost certainly making the recovery less effective, and quite possibly preventing much usable recovery.

REMOVE THE DRIVE FROM THE CASE. You can buy another one for $30.00.

[siratfus]

There is a WMV file that is over 200gb alone. The Zip folder is also over 200gb. I have no clue why. As someone mentioned earlier.. if it's recovering deleted stuff, "ghost stuff," then I think it has to do with the fact that this was once a PS3 drive and was also used in a notebook as the main drive complete with OS. Maybe it's creating files of all this "past life" stuff.

Nelson37, it's a portable drive. I have no way of plugging it into a PC system. I have a notebook and a mac-air. I have to deal with the USB interface.

[Nelson37]

The recovery software is not working properly. Older installed OS and previous usage is not a factor. Files are files.

Recovering previous, deleted files has NO EFFECT on recovering current files with dramatically increased size. That is due to an error. Either a physical error on the drive that the software cannot compensate for, or an error in the software itself. Regardless, it is not working correctly.

You may get some or all the data you want, you may get nothing but garbage. If the latter, I would beg, borrow, or steal a standard PC and hook the drive up as described earlier. If that is not an option, then as an absolute last resort I would purchase a new drive enclosure and install the drive into that.

There are two possibilities of the cause for the problem, the usb case and the drive itself. You can't remove the drive from the equation, but you can remove the interface. Actually, it is possible to remove the circuit board from the drive and replace it with one from another, identical drive. This is a bit extreme and possibly expensive but I have done it in the past and have solved a similar problem at least twice using this method.

[hudsonf]

I've had this problem with bad usb cables.

[siratfus]

I've had this problem with bad usb cables.

Do you mean the main problem of the drive not being recognized and changed to RAW? Or, do you mean my previous post regarding Puran recovering twice the data of the source?

Because for me, it's not bad cables. I know exactly when it happened, and it happened when I plugged it into an Android Box/Stick. Then I took it back to my PC and it no longer recognized it.

[hello_hello]

Because for me, it's not bad cables. I know exactly when it happened, and it happened when I plugged it into an Android Box/Stick. Then I took it back to my PC and it no longer recognized it.

Co-incidence tends to happen far more than it otherwise would when it comes to PCs. The number of times I've been sure "this happened because that happened" and been wrong.....

What you're saying is probably possible (although why connecting it to an Android box would "unformat" it, I'm not sure), while on the other hard that's the exact moment the electronics in the USB case may have decided to go bad, or the hard drive developed a problem. Have you tried a different USB cable?

Ideally, you'd probably remove the hard drive from the case (even if it means destroying the case) and connect it directly to the PC, although given it's size it could be an IDE drive (rather than SATA) so that'd rely on the PC having an IDE connector on the motherboard, but at least that way you've eliminated the USB to IDE/SATA conversion as causing a problem with the file recovery software.
Under different circumstances you could simply try reformatting it and saving files to see if it's still working okay, but in this case you don't want to risk damaging the files you want to recover.

I bought a USB hard drive case once which gave me all sorts of grief. I thought I'd installed a faulty hard drive. It turned out the supplied USB cable was the culprit.

[drjtech]

Also, is it possible to get back the original dates of the pictures? I see all that info is gone, replaced by current date.

If the Master File Table was damaged then your filesystem timestamps are gone but the original timestamps of the picture should be inside the EXIF metadata.

You can use an EXIF Renamer to rename your recovered files based on the EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data stored by most modern cameras.

Here's one that runs on the Mac: http://www.qdev.de/?location=mac/exifrenamer

[hudsonf]

I've had this problem with bad usb cables.

Do you mean the main problem of the drive not being recognized and changed to RAW? Or, do you mean my previous post regarding Puran recovering twice the data of the source?

Because for me, it's not bad cables. I know exactly when it happened, and it happened when I plugged it into an Android Box/Stick. Then I took it back to my PC and it no longer recognized it.

My problem was the drive not being recognized.

[classfour]

Glad the OP is having some luck.

I'm in the "don't format" crowd for data recovery.

I suspect the Android box wiped the master boot record of the drive. It may have been recoverable - but not without a format. The format may or may not have deleted the data. For me, if the data was critical - I wouldn't format the drive unless it's a last resort.

[siratfus]

Well, I got my data, just in unorganized fashion. Got myself another hard drive and see if I can get anything better with Getdataback, but their discovery tree is impossible to understand.. at least for me. Even though I'm complaining about the Puran File Discovery version, at least they put all my jpgs in a jpg folder, png in a png folder, doc in a doc folder, mp4 in a mp4 folder, etc.

I have no clue how to read GetDataBack.

[siratfus]

Is there an IRFAN VIEW expert here who can instruct me on how to batch save the pictures with the original EXIF info? Irfan is not allowing new registrants. I've been waiting for my account to be approved for weeks now.

So what I mean is when I view the pictures using "DETAILS" in a windows folder, I will see the original exif date. Right now, all the dates are showing 12/18/2013, which is the date the files were recovered.


Is this possible?

[vhelp]

post a few insignificant images. the actual files in a zip file...

[siratfus]

I figured it out. It's just a matter of simply batch re-saving. I thought there was more to it because it wasn't working, but it turns out there is something quirky with the irfan plugins. I guess they were not installed properly. I re-install and it's working properly.