Recovering Data from a Corrupted External Hard Drive

[Doc Holliday]

So I have this External Hard Drive with important data on it I would like to retrieve. Some of the files appear in Windows Explorer, some don't. But the space allotted for all the files shows up as used under properties. Also the files not appearing are seen in Sony Vegas and are playable within.

I would like to retrieve these and back up on another drive but currently I get an error they are unable to copy.

Any solutions?

[kedawa]

Before you do anything, you might want to make a backup image of the entire partition.
Other than that, I don't really know, as I've never used any data recovery software myself.
Have you run chkdsk on the drive?

[Doc Holliday]

How can I do that? When I try to run chkdsk I get a corrupt error. Also this XP machine can read it but a Win7 won't. My immediate plan is to use Vegas to render every video I can access into a new file on another drive. That will be very time consuming and data will be lost in the render, so I was hoping for another alternative.

[Doc Holliday]

I learned my lesson. Keep a functional drive and a back-up on another drive.

[mollipen]

3-2-1-: 3 copies, 2 formats, 1 offsite. The only files you have on only one drive with no back-up are the files you don't care about losing.

[Doc Holliday]

OK so now I have four video files: MTS/AVCHD which I cannot get to play. I'm thinking they are done, but didn't know if there was a way to recover them.

[Josh]

pow

[Doc Holliday]

OK, so this happened again. This time, I left the external hard drive plugged in and the computer running while I was away. A power outage shut the computer off. Now when you connect the hard drive, it asks to format. Can the data on the drive be recovered?

[Rumpy]

Maybe. Worst case scenario is you pay a shit load of money for a company to try and recover what they can.

[kedawa]

If it's not physically damaged, then you can do just as much to recover the data as the pros can. You just need the right software.