[Buckeye]

No real place to put this as it works in several OS's so I will post here.

I had another hard drive go out the other day, it started with a reboot then you see it trying to do a scan disk that checks more files than can possibly list. I am sure you guys have seen this.

So I let it go and it did take a very long time. When finished I ended up with a drive that showed a ton of space used but no files show up.

Geee... this has happened to me before.

What happens is Scan Disk does a pretty good job of recovering files but it puts them in the dreaded folder "found.000".

In order to see this folder you have to turn off Hide System Files so it shows all folders.

Now I have not found a way to actually open this folder as it is protected by the OS for some reason. Best way I have found is to simply copy this folder to another hard drive. So far so good

This copyied folder on the new hard drive is still a Hidden System Folder but you can now open it... YEAH !!

What you see inside this folder is more folders called "dir0000.chk". There could be many of these. Each folder appears to be a directory from the crashed disk.

When I did this I saw dir0000.chk - dir0004.chk inside the found.000 folder. This was a good place to start and I backed up all that information.

How ever all is not so good with doing it that way, many files did not make it through that copy process. It works as does a pretty good job but it misses much.

So I happen to look through my archives of programs and found ARAX Disk Doctor. This was a life saver and I now see everything on the disk that was going out and can copy files and folders off of the bad disk.

Looking into the "found.000" folder I now see 11 of the "dir0000.chk" and can recover much more information.

http://www.disk-doctor.com/

Its only $39.95 and well worth the cost imo.