Losing Files and Folders on Multiple Drives?

I was wondering if someone could offer some help. For years I have been using the method with my files of having a Antec Sata Drive bay which allows hard drives to be connected externally and powered just by sliding into the PC's DVD drive bay.

I have been using this method for years now and not once any problem. I have ammased multiple hard drives and never once any problems, until now.

I am using Windows 8 x64 if this is of any relevence.

A week ago I put in a hard drive and noticed a large folder containing a lot of files had vanished. I noticed however the size of of the hard drive suggested it was still there. After reading guides on the net about getting back non showing files I finally managed to get a "found.000" folder which while it did not show its contents inside Windows, was able to mount it inside Ubuntu and copy the folder out of it to outside the Found.000 to the main partition. I think phew all saved.

I then plug in another drive and some folders are gone from that. And now I have plugged in another drive and folders gone from that and this time a bunch of files are down as 0kb on it too.

I have done a virus scan of my PC with Kaspersky and nothing came up. But I am contused why all these problems are developing on all the hard drives. And I want to know how to get these 0kb files back to their full sized glory.

I run check disk and I get a problem with scanning the drive, every single time I do it and suggests to do the full scan, so I use the full scan and repair and this finds no errors on the drive (and recovers non of the files) and if I try the regular chkdisk again it finds a problem with the drive and says to do the full scan again, and the cycle repeats.

Any suggestions what has all of s sudden went wrong to cause multiple drives to lose files and how to get the files back?

I am feeling there is something inside Windows 8 that is causing this problem to these drives when using internal drives as external, as I never had this with XP, Vista, or Windows 7.

 

For some reason your Windows 8 is not happy with you "hot" plugging/unplugging some drives. I suggest turning the pc off before changing a drive. I know that this is not a permanent solution but maybe would help (in your case) as a "get by" with the "found.000" folder problem until you find a more acceptable solution.
These files (or part files) occur when there has been an "improper shutdown of Windows. Some of the files might be recoverable but are often (in my experience anyway) junk.

see here
and here
freeware software tool for recovery here

 

Thanks for this, on further research it seems I had Write Caching enabled on the drives and this when hotswapping has caused data loss / corrupiton. Why the hell did Windows 8 have this enabled in default, as Windows 7 and earlier clearly didn't as I never once had this issue, but anyway.

Is there any software that anyone can suggest to fix this issue with the lost files/folders due to write cache issues. I am prepared to pay but the problem is most software promises the world and delivers nothing.

 

Not sure if this would work for you as I have only used it to recover deleted files. For this I have used Recuva and have found after testing various other programs as well that it does the best job (and its free).

 

AnthonyG,

Have you tried disabling Fast Startup in Win8?

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=575