Last month I had an accident - external WD HD fell on the floor while it was powered... and as a consequence, some sub-directories with pictures were lost (they became empty).
My first reaction was - OK, lets try to recover it.
PC Inspector File Recovery (freeware) recovered a number of them (after 3 days of scanning !!.. well, it was 1TB drive), but subdirectories and names of the files were lost.. together with the information on the length of the file (I ended up with whole clusters) so I had to repeat the procedure with different default file size set to end up with pictures in 2-3x larger files than necessary... sort of OK, but not quite...
Then I tried Pareto Pro ($50), and it managed to find only a small subset of files (?). The scanning process took 2 days.
The subdirectory, name and date info was also not there.
After this was done, I connected this HD to my AKAI digital TV set top box, that has USB interface for external memory device... and to my biggest (and pleasant, bot not entirely unexpected) surprise, all "lost" files were there, perfectly readable in couple of seconds !!!
So much for all that file retrieving (Pro) software
.... (and for companies that charge you arm and leg to do it for you)
If the Akai Set Top Box can read them in full, with all info ( "lost" according to Windows XP OS), surely there must be the way to retrieve those files easily, without fuss.. Maybe if I try Mac? Or something else.. the problem is, AKAI box can read and display pictures but it can't save them on different media.
Any suggestions?
Damaged (?) external HD, help needed
