I seem to have a disk crash of some kind. A video processing program (VirtualDub) was writing a long video file (12GB), when I suddenly got an access denied message.
I went to my text editor containing the script to generate the video. it said that the file on the disk had changed. When I reloaded the file, it contained garbage.
Now I found that certain folders were giving an error, "H:\folder is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and inaccessible".
I rebooted the machine. The same status.
I remembered not to modify the drive. So, I copied as much data as I could from it. Now, for the last 2 days I am in search of a good, preferably free data recovery program. So far I have tried two, but they could not detect any lost files/folders.
Tried Active@ File Recovery. It chugged for 2 hrs., and now seems to have crashed. Will try again after reboot.
It is important to note that chkdsk did not run on system reboot. Also, I am afraid of running it myself, since the changes are irreversible, and there are complaints about chkdsk.
Is my MFT corrupted?
It is an external Maxtor 320GB 2.5" HDD, with H being a 250GB partition. I recall few instances where the USB cable got disconnected while data was being written into. Could that have caused this?
Significantly, the other partition of 70GB is perfect. I got all data copied from there, and there are no problems.
What should be my next step?
Regards Sanjay