[Biggles]

Would someone please assist me with remedying the following problem? I have a Maxtor 240 gb external drive, portioned into '3' sections labeled 'G', 'H' & 'I', each at approx. 80 gb, used to store family pictures, videos and audio books. I don't turn it on often, but did today, to move some pictures from drive 'C'. I opened 'My Computer' after turning the external drive on to see which partition contained my 'Pictures Folder' which was on the 'I' partition. I held the curser over the 'I' partition to see how much space I had left and in the details on the left side of the page it read, Total Size: 83.8gb with Free Space: 10.6gb. I then clicked on the 'I' partition to open it up, then clicked on the 'Pictures Folder' (the first of 3 folders on 'I') and received an error message "I:\Picture Folder is not Accessible, Access is denied. I held the curser over the "Pictures Folder" and a dialogue line appeared that stated "Folder is Empty" and under details on the left side of the page the following information appeared; Local Disk, File System: NTFS, Attributes: Compressed, then the date the file was last modified. I right clicked on "Pictures Folder" then Properties and under properties the following info. Was given Type: file Folder, Location I:\, Size '0' Bytes, Size on Disk '0' Bytes, Contains '0' Files,'0' Folders, Attributes: Read only. Under Attributes - Advanced, the only '2' tabs that were checked are 1) For fast searching allow indexing service to index this folder and 2) Compress contents to save disk space. No tabs are checked under 'Sharing' or Customize. I even tried to move a folder from 'I' to 'G' with no success. I went to properties under partition 'I' and unchecked compress drive to save disk space and allow indexing service to index this... and received and error message telling me 'not allowed'. I chose to 'Ignore All' and it unchecked the boxes and am still not able to access the folders. I ran, under 'tools' tab of 'properties', check volume test with the tab 'Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors' checked. No results posted. I have run Windows check disc and Norton (Utilities) Disc Doctor with no bad results from either.

Partitions 'G' & 'H' are not affected by this problem. I can open any folder on each, view what is in the folders and even view videos.

I do not understand why I am getting the error message 'I’: is not accessible, or why I am getting conflicting information regarding the 'gb' size on the partition. One way says ‘0’ Bytes, ‘0’ Files and the other way says all but 10.6 gb has been used.

I sincerely appreciate any help anyone could offer because I am the “Picture caretaker” for my family and yes I know I should have BACKUPED to a disc. I get through this mess and that is the first thing I will do!

If I have missed some pertinent information, PLEASE let me know and I will provide.

Thank you,
Robbie

[HVAC888]

Run "diskmgmt.msc" and the run prompt. Disk Management should show the three partitions of the external drive. What does it say about I: ?

[HVAC888]

So disk management doesn't report anything out of the ordinary which is good. Compressing a drive is normally a user initiated option.

Did you enable drive compression?

Open "H:" drive. Open "I:" drive. Drag the "Picture Folder" to the h: drive. Because H: drive is uncompressed, the Picture folder should decompress as it copies over.
Did that work?

[HVAC888]

That error is probably the cause, telling it to ignore the error, may have corrupted the compression.

I've read that compression is reasonably safe when used with the NTFS file system, but I never use it, so I'm out of ideas on how to recover. It may be lost forever. :(

You will probably need to find some type of data recovery utility, like this for example.