Member Avatar for Al

I'm using Windows XP, and I have a Hitachi 2TB drive that I disconnected earlier today. When I reconnected the USB cable I heard it come on, but the prompt asking how I want to open the drive did not. When I checked My Computer it was no longer named "Hitachi" but "Local Disk (E:)" instead. When I open it, none of my folders show. When I check Disk Properties it shows the normal percentages of used/free disk space. Please help!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by KushMishra

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Short assessment and priority: ’s symptoms (Windows sees the volume size but the folder tree is gone and quick recovery attempts produced only partial results) point to FAT metadata or partition-table corruption rather than simple “missing” files. The top priority is to stop making any further writes to that disk and work from a read-only sector image — continued repairs or file copies directly onto the same disk will reduce the chance of a clean recovery.

Recommended recovery workflow (preserve an image first, then recover from the image):

  1. Make a full sector image of the external disk to a different physical drive. A Linux live USB plus GNU ddrescue is a reliable approach for drives that may have bad sectors.
sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdX /path/to/Hitachi.img /path/to/ddrescue.log

(Replace /dev/sdX with the external-disk device and write the image to another drive large enough to hold the entire disk. Run a second ddrescue pass with retries if needed.)

  1. Run TestDisk against the image (or the physical disk read‑only) to search for lost partitions and list/copy files. If TestDisk finds a valid FAT partition it can often copy files intact to another healthy drive.

  2. If filesystem metadata is irreparably damaged, use PhotoRec (file-signature recovery) on the image. PhotoRec recovers many file types but loses original filenames and folder structure.

  3. If those fail or the data is extremely important, stop experiments and consult a reputable data‑recovery lab (professional recovery may be the only safe option).

Notes on previous suggestions: ’s driver reinstall tip helps only when Windows fails to detect the hardware; it won’t repair corrupted FAT metadata. ’s virus theory is possible but less likely given the evidence — an offline malware scan is reasonable after files are recovered. Recuva and Windows’ automatic repairs often give partial results when metadata is damaged; that behavior is consistent with what reported.

After successful recovery, run SMART/health checks (CrystalDiskInfo or equivalent) on the drive and reformat before reuse; if SMART shows problems, retire the disk.

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Member Avatar for Al

Here's a bit more info which hopefully is useful.

C:\Documents and Settings\Chuaz>e:

E:>chkdsk
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume Serial Number is 1AFC-2847
Windows is verifying files and folders...
Windows found errors on the disk, but will not fix them
because disk checking was run without the /F (fix) parameter.
\'Çσ first allocation unit is not valid. The entry will be truncated.
Removing trailing folder entries from \
File and folder verification is complete.

Member Avatar for Al

Here's an update.

I plugged the drive into another cumputer, but was the same.

I ran Find and Mount, but when I mounted the FAT32 as a new drive it looked the same. Blank. It found a couple of small FAT16 partitions as well, but I only got two random jpegs off of that.

I ran Recuva, but it failed and only returned about 600 renamed jpegs and wanted me to manually select each one to recover.

I finally Window's Error Check utilty with "automatically fix file systems" after reading several comments from people saying it restored their entire drive just like it was. Well, now I no longer get error messages when I run chkdsk or dir in Command Prompt, but it didn't restore my files or folders, either.

I then entered attrib -h -r -s /s /d f:*.*
*in Command Prompt, and when I checked my drive it had a folder that is 14.6GB in size named FOUND.000 with a bunch of .chk files which can be changed to .jpg files one by one. But even at that, it's still only a fraction of my data.

Does anyone have any ideas on what to do? I'm adrift at sea here.

Member Avatar for signal121

It must introuced by some virus!
thats why it is is happening.

Member Avatar for KushMishra

Hi try uninstalling your external drive's driver and then plug-in your drive again. Hope that would help you :)

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