Originally Posted by RCharles

Hi everyone,

To improve my laptop's (ASUS F3Jc - Vista Home Premium) performance, I used chkdsk and defrag on each drive. After I'd used the chkdsk and defrag respectively on my USB HDD (Maxtor 750GB) then I couldn't reach my portable HDD. It says "F: is not accesible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." When I right click to open the properties of the driver, It just shows me an empty HDD with no label.

As you can guess there was a huge amount of effort stored in that HDD. How can I recover them?

Thank you very much. Even though I don't have the secret formula of Coca Cola in that HDD, it matters a lot to me. Please help. Thanks again.

Hi buddy,

I understand your pain right as I've gone through something like that. Unfortunately for me I used payware to recover my HDD. The payware is Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional.

I'm not sure if there's another way so I hope somebody can come up with a free solution. I suggest you also restart the computer because I believe chkdsk will unmount the hard disk which renders it unreadable until a restart. I hope this helps.

Originally Posted by RCharles

Thank you. I found a freeware named "PC Inspector File Recovery" that I hope will save me couple of bucks. If I'm not mistaken, I've tried the restart option you mentioned but didn't helped and I can't try again because PC Inspector is now trying to recover my lost files, it says "time left:161 min", probably I've spent two hours already. I appreciate your help, thanks again.

No problem buddy,

Just make sure to recover your files on a drive other than the one that has gone bad, to keep the integrity of that hdd and allow future recoveries to be possible in case it can't recover all your files. Good luck and post your results here.

Here is the new problem (unfortunately): Some of the files are broken and some aren't. I can't open some videos and I can't open any music files. I have the codecs and I'm sure they are up-to-date but still can't open them. What would be the problem?

Edit:Almost all the photos... their size isn't 0 mb's but can't open them.

Edit2:Not only videos and photos I also can't open some programs in the portable HDD.

Edit3:I did nothing but now things seem to be OK. I can open everything. Can someone please explain how something like this can happen? Should I start to believe in supernatural-paranormal things?

Originally Posted by RCharles

Here is the new problem (unfortunately): Some of the files are broken and some aren't. I can't open some videos and I can't open any music files. I have the codecs and I'm sure they are up-to-date but still can't open them. What would be the problem?

Edit:Almost all the photos... their size isn't 0 mb's but can't open them.

Edit2:Not only videos and photos I also can't open some programs in the portable HDD.

Edit3:I did nothing but now things seem to be OK. I can open everything. Can someone please explain how something like this can happen? Should I start to believe in supernatural-paranormal things?

I wouldn't go that far

It's nice to hear you got your stuff back.

My guess is file sharing went nuts somehow, or for the worse version of it, you might be inflicted with a virus. What's your antivirus? Have you tried scanning with Malwarebytes AntiMalware?

Do a scan and post your results here if you think your pc might be infected. Oh and remember to take ownership of ALL (Subfolders and all) the files in your hdd. Good luck and post your results here if you decide to scan.

Originally Posted by RCharles

3 antivirus claim that there are no viruses in my computer and the problem still exists. Some files can be opened, some can't. I think this problem isn't related to ownership issues.

Edit:After a restart, I can't open some files that I'd could before. That's interesting. My machine is mocking me.

Edit2:After disconnecting and then reconnecting the HDD's USB cable, amount of used space is increased and I can open some files that I couldn't before.

Wow, that truly is remarkable.

I wish I could Physically be there to see that. I just love tinkering with stuff like that. So are you able to open all the files now?