HDD Showing 0 Byte folder which is actually more than 20GB

[blitzkrieg7710]

Hi Guyz,

I recently installed Windows XP on my Windows Vista laptop and while doing so, my portable HDD was connected to the machine. Now XP didnt work out so I installed the Vista again. When I tried accessing a particular folder in the HDD, heres what happened:

1. The folder did not open
2. Windows Explorer hanged for some time
3. A pop up message was displayed saying "YOU NEED TO FORMAT THIS DRIVE"

When I tried accessing other folders, the HDD is working fine.

Finally after some time, I saw the properties of this folder and it is saying its a 0 (ZERO) byte folder while actually this folder is more than 20 GB in size. This is the same case with a couple of other folders which have more than 10 GB of data within them.

Now my question to you guyz is that is there any way that I can recover these folders by any chance? can you please post any step-by-step guide for the way/s to go about doing this.


Regards,

Amitsinh Thakur

 

[ElenaP]

1. Search Google for "data recovery software". There are quite a few of these available.
Most of these (including ours) will allow you to create an image (sector-by-sector copy) of the disk.
2. Create an image of the disk (you will need plenty of free space for that).
3. Then, run the data recovery software to examine the image and extract all the data from it.

The delay in Windows Explorer opening the folder suggests that the drive may have developed a bad sector. This is why the disk image is required.