How best can I recover files from this corrupted NTFS volume?
The drive is a Seagate 300Gb PATA on a Windows Home Server box. (Home Server is Windows Server 2003 with some additional software which I am not yet using.) This is purely a data volume, not system boot. It is shared on my home network, and normally accessed from two other machines. It has been working fine for months.
For backup, I keep an equal sized drive in an external USB case, shared on another system. Every night Super File Flexible File Synchonizer 4.0 runs and copies all new files to the shared USB drive.
A month ago the backup drive failed, but that had no effect on the data drive. Finally, yesterday, I replaced the backup drive and and started a full backup. Today, the data drive is corrupted and most of the files are missing. The backup had paused to ask a question, and never copied any files.
The current state of the drive is this: The root now contains everything that was formerly in a sub-folder off the root, and none of the folders that were there yesterday. Yesterday, there was a single file in the root, and that is still there. In addition, there is one new folder containing five files created at 5:37am by an automatic process of mine on another machine. All my other folders are gone.
CheckDsk shows no errors. The drive label is unchanged. However, the drive properties still show the drive is half full (Capacity 280Gb, Free: 149Gb) which is unchanged from yesterday. So the missing files are still allocated space. Also in the root is the Hidden System folder "System Volume Information".
There is nothing in the Recycling Bin. After opening it, the system created a hidden folder "Recycling Bin" in the new root.
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