Windows 10 "loses" files/folders

pclab

Moderator
Hi Guys

This is happened to me 2 or 3 times, but I didn’t give it big importance.
But yesterday a friend of mine questioned me for the same situation.

Picture this:
We have a HDD with Windows 10 working on a PC or Laptop. We take the drive out, connect to another PC and copy a folder to it.
Then we plug it back in to the PC/Laptop and the files/folders are not there, although the space is occupied. They are not visible.
Did anyone noticed this? It is a Windows bug??

Thanks
 
I have experienced this twice, In fact, I tried everything to see the folder and even tried Total Commander nothing showed up, and it shows that the folder is there from the used space. Till now I still can't explain what happened. Hope someone can..
 

pclab

Moderator
jol":1k4qg6h7 said:
[post]8683[/post] it's time to move to Linux :)
Absolutely ehhehe

I have found this command, but still need to try it.
"Please try this as I have seen Windows 8 act strange like this before:

1. Press Windows Key + R (opens run prompt)

2. Type shutown /r /t 0 (restarts PC/ refreshes USN journal)"
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
I've seen this happen when R-Studio was having all their issues relating to symbolic links. It would recover data to a "documents and settings" folder which we all know was really just a symbolic link to the Users folder. However, the data would appear nowhere. But, then if you manually type in the folder name into explorer or navigate via cmd prompt the data was all there and did exist. Windows it seems just refused to display that folder as existing even with hidden folders being displayed.

I'd suspect what you are seeing is a related issue with how Win 10 reads/writes it's file system.
 

lcoughey

Moderator
If memory serves me correct, this first started happening with windows 8 and is connected to the OS file system security. By removing the drive and copying files to it from another system, the OS does not recognize it as "safe" and removes it from the drive when you boot back into the OS. I don't know if there is a fix, other than connecting the source drive to the system and copying the files to it via the host OS.
 

spyderrp7

New member
Hi! I'm having a similar situation with Windows 10 64bit

I have an external drive, it is 5TB, formatted NTFS. I used to have this harddrive mainly to store my big photos collection (photos all the way back from 2005).

So I used to have the photos under folders, for example R:\Photos:\2005\ and inside that folder, there were other subfolders and inside those subfolders the photos of that time that were taken.

We are talking about a lot of Gigabytes of photos here. So one day, I realized that all files were literally gone, excluding the 2013, 2016 and 2017 folders. I never moved those folders, or deleted those. It is really really weird why those photos were gone. Now my drive is not old, so I doubt it has a hardware issue. But the USB 3 controller that the drive was hooked, had a wrong set of drivers installed (I realized that later on), so the wrong set of drivers didn't work very well with the drive, and could corrupt the filesystem of the drive. I remember a lot of times, that suddenly the drive wasn't mounted, and after a restart the Windows would try to repair the drive. Now what I believe is at the last CHKDSK of Windows, I lost my photos.

Now here comes the most interesting part: Scanning the drive with Recuva shows that there are ZERO deleted files. This is insane. How could the drive have ZERO deleted files? This is not possible.

So anyone had a similar experience? How would you approach such kind of behavior? I need to get my photos back (hopefully in directory structure).

I tried the advice with the shutdown command to rebuild USN but it didn't brought my files back.
 

pclab

Moderator
Your case is not the same (it seems so).

You probably have a corrupted MFT. You have to check with another software (like Rstudio) to see if it finds the files/folders.
 
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