unable to access data on external usb drive

[ufasc]

a nasty virus attacked my laptop about a month ago and erased just about everything...I have the laptop up and running fairly well...however, I noticed a few weeks ago that an external USB also apparently was affected in the attack...I had a lot of data on the hard drive in NTFS format, but for some reason after I got the
laptop up and running, it recognized the USB drive as a FAT32 drive...so, I used Partition Magic to convert the drive back to NTFS...there is a considerable amount of *.chk files on the drive, & I found a program online that does a pretty good job of restoring chk files, but there are hundreds of them on the drive...I know there is a lot of data (video, digital photos, etc) on the drive within these chk files...I am either doomed to take days (weeks) of restoring those chk files, or else reformatting the hard drive? Is there another way out?

chris carr

[BipolarBill]

There'sa no easy way. You should have run the recovery straight up. The conversion you ran added a step to a more difficult recovery. The CHK files are a nail in the coffin. :(

[ufasc]

so should I just go ahead and format the hard drive and start over? I am using XP Home edition; internal and external hard drives are already using NTFS, so should this corrupted hard drive also be formatted to NTFS specs?

[BipolarBill]

You can use the file system you like. FAT32 is easier to recover in the end, but I'm afraid that your lost files are not going to be worth the money or time that will be required.

[ufasc]

are there any really distinct advantages to formatting a hard drive to FAT32 vs NTSC, except for being easier to recover data? If not, then I'll probably go with NTSC...

[BipolarBill]

NTSC is a TV standard. NTFS (new technology file system) is a hard drive file system.

The only advantage that NTFS has is the ability to encrypt a user's files, but only on Professional Windows versions. Otherwise, FAT32 is easier to deal with.