I just purchased an external 250gb hard drive, set it all up, and not thinking dragged a folder into it rather than "copy / paste. I had 17 gb of mp3 and cdg files in the folder. I moved the external drive to one side while it was doing the transfer and the power cable accidentally came adrift. Now the folder is missing from my fixed drive and only about 300mb of it in the external drive. Is it possible to recover the data on my fixed drive? If so what software do I need to do it?
Thanks in advance.
Should have said that the fixed drive is 115 gig and O/S is Win 2KPro.
did you choose move ?
if not you may be able to recover it from the internal drive.
you need to do as little file manipulation on the internal drive until you are ready to recover the files.
do you have a second pc you could download files with or receive emails with ?
Thanks for the prompt reply.
No I didn't use move. I dragged the folder from fixed drive to the external.
I don't have another PC. Although the drive I was moving from was my D drive and not the C system drive.
Hang on there, if you drag a folder or file from one drive to another, it does a "Copy", not a "Move". "Move" happens only if it stays on the same drive, at least that's what happens to me. So the originals should still be there somewhere.
ok , within reason , files should still be somewhere on the main drive.
pcpro ( for example ) often has software to allow file recovery etc.
or look on the net for something , even if all it will do is tell you if any is there to recover.
http://www.active-undelete.com/products.htm for example
I have found a programme called 'GetDataBack' which searches and lets you know if files are recoverable. This part is free. To actually copy the files then you have to purchase a licence which is 91.64 euros. I am running the software but it will take a while to complete so I will report back later.
Thanks again
Have you done a shutdown/restart since the "accident" to see if the folder re-appears?
Yes did a shut down and start but no joy. But I think that I have got it sorted. I went and borrowed the girlfriends 120 gb 2nd hard drive (not much on it) swapped it for my DVD writer which is a master to CD rom. Got a free 14 day trial program and now its found the files and it is recopying to the "new" drive. It is going to take a while but it has retrieved 3000 files up to now out of 6000 so it looks good. Haven't dared to try and open one of the files yet 'til it has finished.
I won't make the same mistake again. lol almost wrist slashing time.
Thanks for all your help and suggestions - much appreciated.
OOPS.
I meant 300 hundred up to now not 3000.
Still got 3 or 4 hours to go.
Just to say that I got all the files back. I haven't actually tried every one of them but random ones throughout the folder and they are ok.
Well done!
For the future, it is wise to use Copy when you want to move files like this. Check that the copy is OK then delete the original. There is always a risk element with Move.
a link to that program might be useful