Suddenly empty external storage drive!

Makaseo · February 14, 2013

My 1TB LaCie external had about 800GB worth of shtuffs in it, woke up this morning to see that 797GB of it is suddenly gone!

The drive name I assigned to it is gone too, but the path letter I assigned is still set. Only content visible on it is the last folder I copied over to it with a 3GB home video inside.

Currently running a Piriform Recuva deep scan that says it'll take 13 hours, can anyone tell me what might have gone wrong?

RuecanOnRails · February 14, 2013

The drive may have failed, become corrupt, or some other hardware failure. Was the drive dropped or bumped?

There are a number of things that can go wrong including accidental formatting. Or a virus which helped to format it.

Try running CHKDSK to see if there are any bad sectors. I'd also try changing the letter assigned to something else. Try plugging the drive into a different computer and see if anything is recognized.

Let the deep scan finish if you can wait, it may find everything is still intact and working fine. The one thing you want to avoid right now is adding further stuff onto the drive, adding more files may overwrite the current hidden ones.

Makaseo · February 14, 2013

I'm on a Mac, and apparently someone else has had the same problem with another LaCie drive.

Following the solution on that thread, I opened up OSX's disk utility and while it still reads only 3GB used up, it does say I have over 24,000 files on the drive, while I can only see three in Finder/Windows Explorer. The thread stated that re-indexing the drive in OSX would solve the problem, but I'm not seeing any changes.

Just thought I'd give more information about the situation for whatever it's worth.

EricX2 · February 14, 2013

You may want to check something like this.

http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage

It is a bootable linux CD which has some good disk utilities.

I've used it a lot of times with fairly high rate of success.

For an external drive the last effort I always try is the part that you should only do if you are out of the warranty, that is to crack it open (hopefully without doing too much cracking) and try to access it as an internal drive. It could possibly be the USB (or whatever) interface controller causing issues. I had a WD My Book and I had tons of issues on various systems, I put the drive into a different enclosure and it works flawlessly now.