Has anyone seen this before?

One of my users has a WD Elements portable hard drive which was filled with .avi files and the like. He can plug it straight into his TV and access and play them with no problem.

But since he lent the drive to someone to copy, when he plugs it into the computer (and it gets, for example, drive letter K:) he gets " K:\ is not accessible. The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.".

it also appears as 0 bytes.

I can probably fix it with a format, but the question is: what makes it readable on a Samsung TV and not on Windows (on which it was created). I can't imagine the file format changing; as far as I know it was NTFS.

Of course, the first thing I would have done is an FDISK /MBR but that's not around any more.

Anyone seen this before? Or got any ideas, or some relatively non-destructive disk checking tools to recommend?

Thanks.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHKDSK

www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Also more suggestions from Superuser.com

You may also try following softwares

http://www.active-undelete.com/howto_recover_from_deleted.htm

Following software has the ability to preview partition data before recovery
www.partition-recovery.com
www.active-undelete.com
www.eassos.com

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHKDSK

www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Also more suggestions from Superuser.com

You may also try following softwares

http://www.active-undelete.com/howto_recover_from_deleted.htm

Following software has the ability to preview partition data before recovery

www.partition-recovery.com

www.active-undelete.com

www.eassos.com

I don't have a lot of faith in CHKDSK, but thanks for the others, I'll go and have a gander.

Appreciate the reply, thx muchly.

Paragon has a suite of disk utilities that I use but they're not free.

Just find it strange that a bleedin Samsung telly can read it and Windows can't to be honest.

No problem playing the files even. Looks fine.

My guess is the mount device readers on the TV are simplistic, probably Read-Only, and do a cursory job of slurping enough data to read the file names and file allocation table. Whereas the Windows OS, being all professional wants to properly assess and verify if you are the owner, whatever, and eventually zeroes out when it finds one of the commas has been dotted.

If you have a linux system with USB, see what it does with it.

I get this quite a bit. Even on my standalone backup drives. Don't know why, but it does happen. This thread has some great info:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/288067-32-external-hard-drive-corrupted-unreadable

I've also had my hard drives completely unreadable. Couldn't get a drive assigned. That's relatively easy to fix also. Hope you get it solved!!

I get this quite a bit. Even on my standalone backup drives. Don't know why, but it does happen. This thread has some great info:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/288067-32-external-hard-drive-corrupted-unreadable

I've also had my hard drives completely unreadable. Couldn't get a drive assigned. That's relatively easy to fix also. Hope you get it solved!!

Well the good thing is that the worst case scenario is to format it, I'm pretty certain the drive isn't physically damaged.