External Hard Drive Issue

Ronnie1

New member
Hi All,

I have an external hard drive on which I store travel photos! 9000 in total of my travels. Yesterday I foolishly tried to connect it to my android phone as I was advised I could view the photos via an app on my phone. Suffice to say I downloaded 2 apps on android which apparently allow me to view my external hard drive. This did not work and now when i connect the hard drive to my laptop the only 2 files on it are android files from my phone. I do not know what I have done or if I can rectify it or if I have lost all my photos. I am by no means computer savvy and was wondering if you guys have any advice! Thank You
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Needless to say, don't copy any more files onto your external HDD, don't install anything onto it, and don't format it should anything ask you whether you want to do that.

I'd also suggest you look into buying another external HDD / buying cloud storage. Not because your HDD is faulty, but so that if you recover the photos (or if you fail to recover the photos but start using it for other important documents) you can keep another copy in case something unfortunate happens to your HDD again...
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Oussebon's first sentence is vital; do not write anything to that drive at all!

The good news is that you haven't lost your photos - as long as you don't write to the disk that is.

The way the file system works is that there is a directory (the Master File Table, or MFT) that points to where everything is on the disk. What's happened is that for some reason the pointers in the MFT to your photos have been lost - but the photos themselves are still on the disk. Imagine an encyclopedia that's somehow lost it's index; all the information is still there but it's now much harder for you to access. The danger for you is that all the space currently occupied by your photos is now marked as free space so if you write to the disk the new data will overwrite one or more photos, then the photo(s) really will be gone.

What you need is an 'uneraser', software that will scan your disk locating potential files and allowing you to rebuild the MFT to point to them again. The Easus tool that Tony1044 linked to is a particularly good one, Recuva from Piriform (https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva) is another free tool I have used in the past.

WARNING!

Before you start trying to recover your photos please buy another external hard disk first. When you run the recovery tools you'll need somewhere to write the files the tool finds and you absolutely do no want to be writing to the same disk you're trying to recover! When you run the recovery tool tell it to write any files it thinks it can recover to the new hard disk, never write to the old hard disk until you have recovered everything you want from there.

There is a hard lesson here for everyone; never ever mess with the only copy of anything.....

:)
 
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