0
I have an 8TB exFAT formatted external hard drive that I use for storing movie backups for my Plex server. It originally had two ~4TB partitions. First partition for Plex movies and the other for randomness. When the time came that I needed the remaining space on the drive for my growing movie collection I deleted the second partition and expanded the first exFAT partition to fill the drive. Now it shows as 3.02TB out of 7.27TB used but the only folder on the entire drive "Movies" is 0 bytes in size. "Recycle Bin" is 129 bytes, and System Volume Information is 88 bytes. I have it set to show hidden and system files on two seperate computers that I tested this with and get the same results. So my movie files are on the drive and Windows shows the 3.02TB of movies still being there, but they don't physically show up on the drive.
Running chkdsk immediately halts with error "An unspecified error occurred (766f6c756d652e63 45d)." and exits. A quick scan with Recuva shows no files. I'm waiting on the results of a deep scan but even for just the first 4TB of the drive I'll be waiting at least four hours. While that is happening I was hoping someone could chime in on here with a possible suggestion? I chose exFAT for being usable between Windows and Ubuntu without Windows file security issues between multiple Windows computers, however after this is done I'm just going to switch back to NTFS, it can have permissions issues but it tends to not lose data.
herculeesjr
Posted 2018-06-14T20:03:28.453
Reputation: 143
Have you tried formatting the drive? That should work if you are just trying to reclaim the unused space. – bdr9 – 2018-06-14T20:06:52.180
Whatever support Linux has to offer for NTFS is probably a lot more mature than anything regarding exFAT, which is not even in the kernel. // How did you expand the exFAT partition? From Windows? Why not just format it again? – Daniel B – 2018-06-14T20:09:30.050
I'm trying to recover the 3.02TB of movies from my drive, doing a format risks having something written over in the process. At the moment nothing at all new has been written to the drive. All that happened was I expanded the exFAT partition to fill the remaining ~4TB of the 8TB drive. So hypothetically all my files should be 100% in-tact and just need some sort of filesystem repair to access them again. – herculeesjr – 2018-06-14T20:18:08.030
OK, I understand your problem now. Based on your question title I thought you were just trying to get your drive to show 100% free space. I think that the Recuva deep scan is a good option. I personally have only used it on NTFS partitions, but hopefully it will work in your situation. If you are able to recover the files I would suggest copying them to another drive, formatting the entire 8TB drive, and then copying them back. – bdr9 – 2018-06-14T20:22:26.400
Thanks, I adjusted a couple sentences to clarify my issue in my question. I can see how it was a little fuzzy in that regard. Hopefully Recuva can find the movies undamaged and if/when it does I have a second drive I'll move them all to for safe keeping while I reformat this one. – herculeesjr – 2018-06-14T20:39:35.283
Jeez, I hope you had a backup..... – Moab – 2018-06-15T00:02:56.273
After trying multiple different programs that couldn't see files that were clearly on the first half of the drive (and not fragmented at all) I finally found TestDisk 7.1 was able to recover the original partition pre-expansion. It wrote the changes to the disk and everything was there again in the 4TB partition. (Only time will tell if any movies are damaged.) I bought an identical 8TB drive and am currently moving everything to it, once finished I'll use disk management to mirror the two drives for redundancy. I have too much data for one drive at this point and this was too close a call. – herculeesjr – 2018-06-15T01:03:48.363