Crashed hard drive

Mware

New Member
This is a vary weird type of hard drive crash. I had a power surge that fried my motherboard about 1 week ago, and it crashed the hard drive. I have a external SATA-2-USB that I can plug my SATA into to and see it on my working computer.

After the drive crashed, I plugged it into my external USB reader, and all the files were there in the places they needed to be. I copied over the office documents that I needed and when I tried to open them on my working computer all I got was a document full of garbage fonts. The folder on the crashed hard drive that contained the documents was not encrypted. but the folder was password protected using the windows folder password tool.

HERE IS WHERE IT GETS WEIRD

I plugged the hard drive into the USB reader today the computer see's the hard drive labeled F: as it did before. The computer is able to open the drive, but now all the files are gone. The computer tells me there is 111GB space 111GB free. There was no formatt performed, and read / write activity of any kind to the hard drive since it crashed. How could all the files remove themselves? I ran pcinspector and it recovered over 50,000 files in the "Lost" directory. when i try to boot from the hard drive, it says "ntlder is missing". I can fix that issue, but when I open the hard drive in my working computer, there are no folders to put an ntloader in.

When the hard drive is plugged into the USB reader, it spins fine, powers up fine, no clicking, no signs of abnormal behavior.
I have never seen anything like this.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
This is a vary weird type of hard drive crash. I had a power surge that fried my motherboard about 1 week ago, and it crashed the hard drive. I have a external SATA-2-USB that I can plug my SATA into to and see it on my working computer.

After the drive crashed, I plugged it into my external USB reader, and all the files were there in the places they needed to be. I copied over the office documents that I needed and when I tried to open them on my working computer all I got was a document full of garbage fonts. The folder on the crashed hard drive that contained the documents was not encrypted. but the folder was password protected using the windows folder password tool.

HERE IS WHERE IT GETS WEIRD

I plugged the hard drive into the USB reader today the computer see's the hard drive labeled F: as it did before. The computer is able to open the drive, but now all the files are gone. The computer tells me there is 111GB space 111GB free. There was no formatt performed, and read / write activity of any kind to the hard drive since it crashed. How could all the files remove themselves? I ran pcinspector and it recovered over 50,000 files in the "Lost" directory. when i try to boot from the hard drive, it says "ntlder is missing". I can fix that issue, but when I open the hard drive in my working computer, there are no folders to put an ntloader in.

When the hard drive is plugged into the USB reader, it spins fine, powers up fine, no clicking, no signs of abnormal behavior.
I have never seen anything like this.

Any help would be appreciated.

I would back up anything you need off of it, then run the diagnostic utility for it, and see if it is failing or something.
 
That is part of the problem. The stuff that I backup such as office files are corrupted or filled with unreadable text. So before I do anything to the hard drive that does any write/re-write, I want to make sure I am trying everything to get the data back.

I just do not see how the hard drive can have data visible one day, and then the next it looks like a good blank hard drive. Before i do anything to the bad hard drive, I want to try and figure out why my documents are showing unreadable text. Would it have something to do with the NTFS table missing, or something else related to the old OS?
 
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