So last night... I was playing some h games from my 16TB WD hard drive that I got a few months ago... And... The hard drive decided to commit seppuku... Or least the File System did anyway? The error I got was "The Master File Table contains a corrupted file record. etc" And regardless of what I did, other than plugging it in and entering my Bitlocker password, the drive was not accessible.
Now the thing is, I don't keep the important stuff in one hard drive, I keep them in multiple places so it's not so much the important stuff that I have to worry about but losing 5-6TBs worth of videos, music and such would be a huge pain since it's been a while since I backed up those to a separate hard drive. But when I searched the errors, it says to try chkdsk and when I tried various fixes, none of them worked.
So new plan then... Instead of trying to fix the file system corruption, how about we try and recover the data instead? After researching, I basically landed on two tools: GetDataBack Pro and UFS explorer. And after starting the scans, yes, it is able to find them but as they scan sector by sector, it would take an estimated 38 hours to scan through everything and recover the files. For me, that's not a big deal but the key is these are free to start sort of a programs. They will let you use them to scan and find the files but to recover, you gotta pay. But that's not really a big deal and it's only around $80 for a lifetime license however...
I found another program from the makers of CCleaner and it's free. It's called Recuva and apparently it's very fast. So I stopped the scan from the other program and ran this. In about 10 minutes, it seems to have found all my files...
Now there doesn't seem to be a file structure since... Well the file system nuked itself I guess but hey, it's better than nothing. However I don't exactly have 5-6TBs free so I can't exactly recover everything. But the good thing about Recuva is that you can limit its scan to try and find certain file types instead. So I went ahead and limited to videos only and etc and boom...
Luckily newegg ebay is having a sale on a 14TB WD external hard drive so I went ahead and bought that. Once it arrives, I will recover the rest!
Crisis Averted!
PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850
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