As some of you will know, I have an old XP box which I keep for older software etc, but which isn’t connected to the internet anymore.
Recently I’ve been saving files to an external drive which is encrypted using Truecrypt.
Yesterday, Windows froze whilst accessing that drive, and now freezes every time I re-try, with the message “L is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable”.
Xubuntu accesses the drive via Truecrypt with no problem, except that the folder I was using in XP now appears empty. I was thinking of using Gparted to attempt data recovery or create a partition table. However, messing about with partition tables is way above my pay grade and feels like a recipe for disaster…
Dunno what to suggest here Mike that wouldn’t risk further data loss … if Xubuntu can access it, rather than trying to “fix” it and risking screwing it up more, I’d want to copy the data off first.
And once you’ve already done that, it becomes easier to just reformat the drive rather than trying to “recover” data you already have.
I’d only attempt to “fix” it where there was nothing to loose, such as where no OS could access it, so it was already effectively considered “lost”.
The disk in question is one of three backups, so almost all the data is safe already (or at least, as safe as data CAN be). I just wanted to avoid a reformat for the sake of one folder - we’re talking about nearly a terrabyte of data here.
On reflection, I think I’ll just buy a couple more drives, bury myself in backups and reformat the disk anyway. I’m paranoid about disk failure since a PSU took out two drives recently. I’m leaning towards a policy of using external drives so that no two disks rely on the same power supply…
I’ll mark this solved now. Thanks again for your time.