Corrupt data on Linux/Windows External HDD
 

Hi everybody

I have searched the forum for an answer to my problem but can't find one so here goes.

I have a 1T WD external drive I us as a repository for my media.

It is formatted as HPFS/NTFS

I was clearing some stuff off my Windows 10 machine (as the disk was near capacity) onto this drive

When I switched to my Linux Mint machine a number of folders had ‘disappeared’ and the ones that hadn’t contained a lot of corrupted files.

Running Error Checking on the Windows machine gets to about 95% and then reports that it could not complete.

I had read that I should run chkdsk on the windows machine. Whilst running it reported that a lot of corrupt files were being deleted and ended in an error message.

I was then advised to run fsck on the linux machine (with disk unmounted) but any use of fsck on this disk just returns to command prompt

I was then advised to use ntfsprogs, but got the 'Package ntfsprogs is not available, but is referred to by another package' message

Properties in Linux show: 3,270 items, totaling 27.8 GB (some contents unreadable)
but only 60 Gig free space (from 1T), so I am assuming that the files are there somewhere.

Any help please, and could you make it ‘step by step’ as I am still not that familiar with Mint commands and structures

Many thanks in advance

Mike

There are data recovery software options. I usually recommend PhotoRec, but there are others.

You should have some idea what this 900+ GB of data actually is, and you should also know whether or not there is any encryption or encrypted partitions on this drive. For instance and encrypted partition may explain why a disk utility sees only 60G of free space. When you run fdisk or gparted and view the partition table, what do you see for partitions and their sizes?