Saturday, June 22, 2013

Disaster happened to my external hdd

It was unlucky day. I was trying to perform a OS backup to an external drive. I own a DELL latitude E4310 laptop. I recently upgraded to 64bit Windows 7 OS and was having much fun with it until I thought of backup up my OS. So I plug in my old faithfull 500GB external hdd drive. A friend recommended to use the Dell Backup and Recovery Manager. I followed his advice and launch the software and proceed with the instructions. Everything seems fine the software comes with additional warning that it will wipe out the partition of the drive that I chose to backup which is my external hdd's partition. I do have two partitions in this external hdd call it e: f:. I directed DELL manager to f: drive for the image backup. Within 5 seconds, "kaboom", all my partitions and data in the external drive all gone. Two partitions e: f: disappeared into thin air and merge into one large chunk.

Well here comes recovery time and test one's skill. I search around and asked for help. I tried a couple and ended settle down with GetDataBack for NTFS. The tool did the work manage to recover some of my files. While some were unable due to sector overwritten earlier.

After recovery, some files began to have a depth subdirectories due to some corrupted file system, I presume.  I have a hard time deleting them in Windows. It gives error "Source Path Too Long"



Finally, I google around and checked many methods, unlocker software won't help because the file is no lock anyway. I did a installation of cygwin and use it to remove the nuisance.






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