The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable - PISSED

[babykailan]

Hi all,

I bought a CFI 4-bay enclosure recently. Everything working well until the a few days ago when out of the blue 2 of my HDs went offline. The error msg is "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". I was STILL pretty OK because those two did not contain critical information and I could just do a re-partition and re-format.

The last straw came when the 3rd one also went out on Sunday evening. Same msg. Now I am mighty pissed because I basically saved my whole life on this HD. So far I lost 1 terabyte of data.

Running Win XP SP3 and using Firewire connection. My last backup was about a month ago and there was very very important data saved since then. There is no physical issue ie. no bad sectors, no click clicks, NO virus. I also used another Vantec enclosure and the HD remains unaccessible. TESTDISK says filesystem is damaged.

Can anyway assist? Getting a data recovery guy to do the work will be a very very very last resort. I am very sure the data is still there. Just the MBR or file record or metadata is screwed up. TIA!!!

 

[Del_CtrlnoAlt]

MBR can be fixed.

iirc there is a command... but you have to know, what is that enclosure using. If its using a proprietary OS to run that, then you'll have a problem... esp if its one that will format the hdd to run Linux and samba.

 

[vince123123]

I have been using CFI enclosures and do not have any problems with them so far. In fact I have 2x8bay enclosures

I do suggest you can try this program (you do need to pay for it, but it's far cheaper than any data recovery centre). Active Undelete.

It does quite a good job of recovering data that is already there, but is somewhat inaccessible.

Hi all,

I bought a CFI 4-bay enclosure recently. Everything working well until the a few days ago when out of the blue 2 of my HDs went offline. The error msg is "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable". I was STILL pretty OK because those two did not contain critical information and I could just do a re-partition and re-format.

The last straw came when the 3rd one also went out on Sunday evening. Same msg. Now I am mighty pissed because I basically saved my whole life on this HD. So far I lost 1 terabyte of data.

Running Win XP SP3 and using Firewire connection. My last backup was about a month ago and there was very very important data saved since then. There is no physical issue ie. no bad sectors, no click clicks, NO virus. I also used another Vantec enclosure and the HD remains unaccessible. TESTDISK says filesystem is damaged.

Can anyway assist? Getting a data recovery guy to do the work will be a very very very last resort. I am very sure the data is still there. Just the MBR or file record or metadata is screwed up. TIA!!!

 

[babykailan]

I have been using CFI enclosures and do not have any problems with them so far. In fact I have 2x8bay enclosures

I do suggest you can try this program (you do need to pay for it, but it's far cheaper than any data recovery centre). Active Undelete.

It does quite a good job of recovering data that is already there, but is somewhat inaccessible.

Thanks bro. Program looks good but have you used it? If so can I chk does it recover FILENAMES as well? I got about 10,000 files and dont think recovering them with filenames as serial nos. will be helpful. I will probably pull my hair out sorting them. LOL...

Any other ways to accessing a unreadable or corrupted file / directory or damaged filesystem? Can anyone shed light if fiddling with the MBR, partition tables or FAT will help or something? I strongly believe it is a case of software screwup.

 

[vince123123]

Yup, I speak from personal experience. In my case, it recovered everything, directory structure, filenames everything.

Thanks bro. Program looks good but have you used it? If so can I chk does it recover FILENAMES as well? I got about 10,000 files and dont think recovering them with filenames as serial nos. will be helpful. I will probably pull my hair out sorting them. LOL...

Any other ways to accessing a unreadable or corrupted file / directory or damaged filesystem? Can anyone shed light if fiddling with the MBR, partition tables or FAT will help or something? I strongly believe it is a case of software screwup.

 

[babykailan]

I ran TESTDISK and discovered BOTH the MFT and MFT mirror are damaged. Goodness. So is there no other way apart from buying a data recovery software? :sweat:

What could had caused this? :thumbsd: