how to recover file from usb after disk utility repair "first aid" option

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My friend had 15gb of pictures in a 1 tb usb. It was corrupted (she could not open the folders) in Windows. But the usb still showed 15gb. She tried to to open in Mac (still showed 15gb) used the Disk Utility.....First Aid option then the "Repair Disk". Before she asked for help. Now the disk contains only 300mb. And the folders inside are now "Unix Executable File" with 0 bytes. Can anybody help retrieve the files?
 
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MacInWin

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Welcome to the forums.

Your post is a bit confusing to me, but let me see if I understand it.

1. Your friend has a 1Tb drive connected by USB to a windows machine and put 15GB of pictures on it in a folder or folders.
2. It was corrupted and she could not open or see the folders in windows, but the drive mounted and she was able to see that 15GB was still used.
3. She moved the drive to Mac, it mounted, and she used Disk Utility/First Aid to try to fix the problem.
4. Now the drive shows only 300GB used (or is that left, it's not clear what you are talking about).
5. The folders are now labeled as Unix Executable files, showing 0 bytes (how do you know they are THE folders?)

If that restatement is right, what format is the drive? NTFS? HFS+? Something else? If it's NTFS, how did she fix it in OS X since OS X doesn't natively write to NTFS drives? If it's HFS+ or some other OS X format, how did she write to it on Windows, given Windows doesn't natively support OS X formats? What Mac, what version OS X? What version Windows? Did she try anything to recover the drive on Windows? Does she have any backups on either machine? Did she get any messages from the attempt to repair on OS X?
 

Slydude

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Good questions Jake. I had the same thoughts. I'm afraid that either of the following has happened:
1. The drive was inadvertently formatted.
2.If this was an NTFS drive trying to repair it with Disk Utility probably did not end well. That's usually not recommended as I'm sure you know.
 
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Very hard diagnosising things second hand as it may be better if your friend posts direct. Sounds like the Windows PC has formatted the disk or if she has run Erase instead First Aid.
 

chscag

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Good questions Jake. I had the same thoughts. I'm afraid that either of the following has happened:
1. The drive was inadvertently formatted.
2.If this was an NTFS drive trying to repair it with Disk Utility probably did not end well. That's usually not recommended as I'm sure you know.

Probably 1. since Disk Utility will refuse to repair a drive formatted to NTFS. ;D
 
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Welcome to the forums.

Your post is a bit confusing to me, but let me see if I understand it.

1. Your friend has a 1Tb drive connected by USB to a windows machine and put 15GB of pictures on it in a folder or folders.
2. It was corrupted and she could not open or see the folders in windows, but the drive mounted and she was able to see that 15GB was still used.
3. She moved the drive to Mac, it mounted, and she used Disk Utility/First Aid to try to fix the problem.
4. Now the drive shows only 300GB used (or is that left, it's not clear what you are talking about).
5. The folders are now labeled as Unix Executable files, showing 0 bytes (how do you know they are THE folders?)

If that restatement is right, what format is the drive? NTFS? HFS+? Something else? If it's NTFS, how did she fix it in OS X since OS X doesn't natively write to NTFS drives? If it's HFS+ or some other OS X format, how did she write to it on Windows, given Windows doesn't natively support OS X formats? What Mac, what version OS X? What version Windows? Did she try anything to recover the drive on Windows? Does she have any backups on either machine? Did she get any messages from the attempt to repair on OS X?

Thank you for your response.
1. Yes, the 1TB drive was used in windows showed 15GB files of pictures.
2. Yes, it was corrupted in windows and she could not open the folders but still reflects 15GB used.
3. Yes, she mounted the 1TB drive in MAC (still showing 15GB used) and tried to fix it in using Disk Utility/First Aid.
4. Now the drive only shows 300MB used or was left in the 1TB.
5. The folders became Unix Executable Files because of the labels.
6. MAC used was OSX Yosemite 10.10.3

Attached is the screenshot of the image of the
-1TB drive info,
-the1TB drive in Finder and,
-Disk Utility Log.

Thank you so much for taking time to read this and for helping figure this out. Should I try to recover using other applications?

ten2.jpg

ten3.jpg
 

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OP
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Very hard diagnosising things second hand as it may be better if your friend posts direct. Sounds like the Windows PC has formatted the disk or if she has run Erase instead First Aid.

Thank you for your insight but regarding my friend to post directly, she is a flight attendant, always on the go, and has no background in IT at all. A different person recommended to try and recover in MAC, then this happened. She cant retrieve her pictures from the 1TB drive.
 
M

MacInWin

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From the log it appears that someone answered some questions about the drive which gave the repair process authority to destroy the folders. Note that someone or some thing answered "Yes' to the system's assessment that the folders were NOT folders, so DU "fixed" the problem. Part of the fix was to release the sectors in the folder, meaning it marked as unused the sectors occupied by the photos. Now, every time you mount that drive in OS X it sees all that space as free and starts to write hidden files to it that OS X uses to track it, so some of those pictures may be overwritten already. Stop mounting that drive in OS X immediately to keep from making it worse. The only way I can think of to try to repair the drive is to go to a Windows machine and use a reputable disk recovery software package there. Even that may be dicey as disk utility has done a lot of reconstruction on the drive. If she's unable to do that, then one of the disk recovery services may be able to recover it, but they are very, very expensive.
 

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