HELP! and I dont mean the song by the Beatles

I turned on an extermal HD today and it is showing as completely empty, eek! I know the files are there of course and I am currently running Recuva to find and transfer them onto another drive although many, as far as I can see, the ones which were never deleted have lost their file names. Frustratingly Recuva has found long deleted files which have their's intact.

Is their any way I can just restore of rebuild the file structure and directory?

If this happened I'd take the drive to my local computer shop and let the professionals do it. We have one about half a mile away, don't know about Glasgow!

1st rule..... Don't do anything in haste.

2nd...........If you don't know what you're doing - don't do anything


Maybe these are back to front, but either way I think John's advise is sound. Just check that the 'repair man' also abides by the above.
As its not his data to loose he can afford to be a bit blase.


regards
Bernard

^ yup. If the data is important, it's not a "computer shop" you need it's a qualified forensic recovery specialist.

That would be very expensive dpm, by "computer shop" I mean my local computer service specialist, but no need for fancy titles!

personally John I'd have more faith in the average punter's abilities with some on-line coaching, than that of the average "IT pro".

JMHO, you understand.

Just out of curiosity what brand drive was it Ken

Bernard gets a +1

The drive is a Packard Bell Store & Save. I think the culprit was a dodgy cable which lost contact whilst the drive was being written to but a couple of pieces of software seemed to have saved the day. A lot of time was wasted with a thing called Recuva which found both deleted and undeleted files but I got 'access denied' when I tried to recover them and technical support couldn't help at all. 7-Data Recovery Suite has done the trick with everything except Pentax RAW files but Camera Raw Photo Recovery is dealing with that. Interestingly in their blurb they say in comparison to other makes' RAW files, 'RAW photo format used in Pentax cameras. PEF images do not undergo any of these procedures and retain a wide color gamut and luminance range. Actually, raw images are pretty close to the real picture in terms of details and colors, because they contain much more information.'

But we all knew that anyway.

I know have very short fingernails.

Thanks for the update Ken. Pleased your data is intact. At present I store my stuff on a FreeNAS set up version 0.7.2. with two 300Gb drives. I read version 8 is terrible so wont attempt an "upgrade". As it runs on a home network I can store stuff from any computer.

I use Carbonite as an online backup and for some reason this drive wasn't assigned to it. Doh!