Secondary Hard Drive Data Corruption

[V6-BoI]

So just a little back story:

I have 2 hard drives on my computer, a primary drive where it has my OS and programs and a secondary drive to keep my data (ie. music, movies, pictures, etc). About a year ago, I bought a SSD to replace my primary drive so my computer would run faster. I basically did a clone my existing primary drive to my new SSD, and just swapped the two drives around. My computer booted up fine without any issues and was running awesome at the time. The past year, my SSD has been kinda flaking out (random blue screens, and my computer would just randomly freeze now and then, and just not boot up). So today I decided to put my old HDD back in and take out my SSD and return it to memory express for a new one (good thing I bought the 2 year warranty). When I booted up my old HDD, I noticed that half the stuff on my secondary HDD was missing. It's as if when I swapped back my old primary HDD, my secondary HDD went back to the same state it was at a year ago, and all the stuff I put on it the past year is gone. Anyone have any idea what's happening? I'm trying to use Recuva right now to hopefully recover the data that was on there.

[revelations]

That doesent make sense

How can your drive go from, eg. 400GB used to 200GB used with the removal of another physical drive? Can you confirm the drive usage before/after?

[V6-BoI]

Can't confirm the numbers exactly, but I do kinda recall that before it was around 700-800 GB, but now it's about 340 GB. I have certain folders that do not show up at all anymore.

One thing I forgot to mention was when I put back my old drive, and started up my computer, windows gave a error recognizing my secondary drive and attempted to "fix" it. After the fix it is when I noticed the problem.

[firebane]

If you run a drive test on it how many bad sectors is the drive finding? Chances are the low drive space is because the bad sector count is so high its reducing the amount of space to not allow the drive to destroy itself. The drive should be removed from the system immediately and hooked up to a USB dock of some form to do actual analysis.

[revelations]

Yea definitely run a quick, SMART disk status - use a free tool like CrystalDisk info for eg.

http://crystalmark.info/redirect.php?product=CrystalDiskInfo

Worst case you may have to do a block->block clone of the drive and attempt data recovery that way. Running heavy tasks on dying drives is very risky.

[UndrgroundRider]

So just a little back story:

I have 2 hard drives on my computer, a primary drive where it has my OS and programs and a secondary drive to keep my data (ie. music, movies, pictures, etc). About a year ago, I bought a SSD to replace my primary drive so my computer would run faster. I basically did a clone my existing primary drive to my new SSD, and just swapped the two drives around. My computer booted up fine without any issues and was running awesome at the time. The past year, my SSD has been kinda flaking out (random blue screens, and my computer would just randomly freeze now and then, and just not boot up). So today I decided to put my old HDD back in and take out my SSD and return it to memory express for a new one (good thing I bought the 2 year warranty). When I booted up my old HDD, I noticed that half the stuff on my secondary HDD was missing. It's as if when I swapped back my old primary HDD, my secondary HDD went back to the same state it was at a year ago, and all the stuff I put on it the past year is gone. Anyone have any idea what's happening? I'm trying to use Recuva right now to hopefully recover the data that was on there.

I'm going to ask the stupid question, do you have TWO physical hard drives within your case? It sounds like you had one physical hard drive, that was partitioned into two drives. That would show up to Windows as two "drives." If that's the case, then obviously when switching back to the old physical hard drive, both partitions (or "drives") would be in their old state.

[V6-BoI]

Damn recovery tool takes an entire day, worst part was half way through stupid windows decided it should install some updates and restarted on it's own.

So here's a stupid question, could my old primary drive be looking at an old drive index of my secondary drive and that's why it can't find some files? This doesn't really make sense to me though cuz I figure the index should be local to the actual drive.


Yea definitely run a quick, SMART disk status - use a free tool like CrystalDisk info for eg.

http://crystalmark.info/redirect.php?product=CrystalDiskInfo

Worst case you may have to do a block->block clone of the drive and attempt data recovery that way. Running heavy tasks on dying drives is very risky.

Cool, my next thing to do is to run SMART disc status and see what it shows. Thanks for the recommendation for the program


I'm going to ask the stupid question, do you have TWO physical hard drives within your case? It sounds like you had one physical hard drive, that was partitioned into two drives. That would show up to Windows as two "drives." If that's the case, then obviously when switching back to the old physical hard drive, both partitions (or "drives") would be in their old state.

Yeah it's two physical drives. The drive that's messed up is a 3TB HDD (not partitioned)