Storage HDD Data corruption following accidental unplug

A now sordid evening in the Broker household.

I made the mistake of unplugging an external SATA hard drive (USB not ESATA) while it was powered on and connected to my computer. I quickly rectified my mistake, however, now - while the disc shows all the files previously on the drive; it fails to load any of them; with each corresponding application giving an appropriate error.

I'm confused and annoyed as to how this happened, considering no files on the drive were opened, or being accessed - the drive was just idling & given the speed with which I reconnected the power, surely not every of my 320Gb of files could be affected? [which they are].

As the drive is an external one, Win 7 won't allow the checking for the disc for errors.

I thought that perhaps it was something wrong with the filesystem (in line with my comment about how every single file was affected) - how would I go about confirming this, and indeed solving my little dilemma, a lot of the files are irreplaceable!

My regards, and thanks in advance.

TSB

 

just going to throw some ideas in (probably wont be of any use, but hey, i tried)

can you copy them from the external drive onto your main drive and try opening there?

can you access them through a dos prompt?

what about removing the drive from the casing and plugging it inside the PC?

sorry not much help

 

How irreplaceable are they?

This has the signs of a very expensive recovery.

Turn the drive off (safely) and don't turn it back on until you answered my question (and had a response)

 

run cmd.
CD to the highest level of the external drive (ie E:\ or F:\)
enter in "chkdsk /f" (no quotes) and it MIGHT ask you to reboot to perform this action. It will for sure if you try chkdsk /f on the OS partition.

anyway, yeah, try that. It may take a while for it to go through but I think this may work.