need help retrieving 120 gb of photo

:cry Hi,
I tried to defrag my external hard drive (seabolt 160 g). The first message that I received was that I didn't have enough room to do the defrag. Did I want to proceed? I told the computer to go ahead. The next message that I received was that the computer could not defrag and that I had lost my files. Some folders are showing up without anything in them. Others have files but I can't pull them up with windows or adobe photoshop. Have I lost my complete photo collection or is there anyway that I can save them? I have just spent the last month getting them organized which is why I wanted to defrag them in the first place. I hope that someone can help me. I sure don't want to have to re-format the drive! Some of the photos I do have a back-up copy of, but I know that some of them I don't. Please give me some hope! Thanks Diane

 

Oh Dear Diane! Defrag will not work if your hard drive has less than 15% free space. Windows is close to falling over as well.

This is a data recovery issue, which is big business. Fortunately MG can help.

Firstly DO NO USE THE DRIVE UNTIL YOU ARE ready to recover data. Ideally if you can connect it to another pc and run the data recovery stuff from there you will recover more data.

Look in, guess what, the Data Recovery downloads section of MG. There are lots to choose, Avira is free.
I can't vouchsafe any because I use commercial programs, perhaps another geek has more experience of the local variety.

Good Luck

Studio T

 

Thanks for your reply studiot. I will give that a shot and will just have to remember to take better care in the future. Diane

 

Diane, as this is an external drive some of what Studiot says is not really relevant. Just make sure that you don't write anything to the disk until you have retrieved the data!

It sounds like something has happened to the FAT on the drive. This isn't really a big issue, all the data is still there it's just the drive has forgotten where it put them. Sounds like me and my car keys!

Do not despair, the data should be easily recoverable with one of the free tools in the section mentioned above!