Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Help recovering data from Maxtor external hard drive

Dec 31, 2010 4:17AM PST

I had to reimage my computer due to a virus. Prior to doing so, I transferred (or believed I had transferred) all of my files to our Maxtor external hard drive. I cannot locate my files on the hard drive, however, nor did they transfer back to my laptop completely. The only files that transferred back were my backups from June. Is there any other way of locating the last 6 months of data and pictures that I have now lost?

My laptop is a Toshiba satellite L355-S7812 and I run Windows Vista.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Do other machines read those files?
Dec 31, 2010 9:34AM PST

You didn't reveal what you used to backup. Here I use the simple copy to the external with Explorer. Not hard and never encrypted or in some proprietary format or worse "NTBACKUP".
Bob

- Collapse -
Maxtor is the backup
Dec 31, 2010 10:22PM PST

I don't have another backup- the Maxtor is an external hard drive to which I manually transferred my documents before I reimaged my laptop. Normally, the maxtor will automatically offer to transfer documents (One-touch, I believe), but when connected to my laptop it did not offer me that option, so I copied and pasted to the Maxtor.

- Collapse -
This leaves us with
Dec 31, 2010 10:57PM PST

The same question and more.

1. Do other machines read those files? (or show them.)

2. It's interesting that you opted for automatic or software that you are unsure of how it works or how to recover when it fails. Your copy and paste is one method I use all the time with great success. However a new user might think that such files would automatically copy themselves back. ALL TYPES OF USERS SHOW UP HERE so I can't guess what you are seeing in Explorer on this drive or if you expected the Maxtor to do something automatically.

Try looking at the drive with Explorer for your files.
Try another machine too.

3. That one click option was usually a feature of an application we installed from Maxtor. Since you reinstalled the OS, you would need to reinstall the Maxtor one click app.
Bob