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My GF connected her external HDD to the TV. I don't know what exactly did she do after connecting, but it somehow got reformatted or something. She had a lot of important files on it. Now there's just '_MSTBFKS' folder with one MST_BKFS.IDX file and a lot of .BUK files (and each of those files has exactly 64MB).

At the first glance, it seems the used space is more or less the same as it was before, so I guess the data is still there.

Is there any way we could recover original files?

TFM
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fbxmg
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  • The flash drive did not get reformatted. If it did, there wouldn't be any data left. The important files- what file types were they? – Austin ''Danger'' Powers Mar 03 '13 at 01:29
  • @Dan Well, there were .doc, .docx, .xls and similar files she's been working on. Also, a lot family photos. And most of those files wasn't saved anywhere else. The rest (about 300 GB of 1TB drive) was filled with less important stuff, movies and music. – fbxmg Mar 03 '13 at 07:01

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Try doing a search on that drive using wildcards like this:

*.pdf *.doc *.docx *.xls *.xlsx *.ppt *.pptx *.mp3

Include hidden and system files just in case your file attributes got changed somehow.

Austin ''Danger'' Powers
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  • Nope, nothing. I also tried manually look for anything after un-hiding hidden and system files, but there's nothing. I don't know, it just seems all data got 'transformed' into all those .BUK files. – fbxmg Mar 03 '13 at 12:40
  • Ok it's not looking so good now. At this point I would download Recuva (Google it) and let it do a deep scan, then retrieve as much as possible. – Austin ''Danger'' Powers Mar 03 '13 at 12:44
  • At last, after a few days of working, I think I've managed to restore everything. After talking to GF, I found out that HDD was almost full actually, and that rang a bell, combined with your answer. Recuva found only a few files, but I remembered TestDisk, which found lost NTFS partition on disk. First I used Photorec to be on the safe side, which backed up a lot of data, although it turned out to be unnecessary. Then I just turned lost NTFS partition to a primary partition and re-copied lost files onto disk with TestDisk and voila. :) Thanks for getting me on the right track. – fbxmg Mar 07 '13 at 00:09
  • Glad you got it working. TestDisk sounds like a powerful utility- I'll check it out the next time I run into a damaged partition. Thanks for the heads up. – Austin ''Danger'' Powers Mar 07 '13 at 06:24