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I worked on some documents on my memory stick and then most of the files on it disappeared. The system shows these stats for the stick: 

capacity 59.6GB, used 51GB, free 8.58GB

That seems approximately correct. However, While some folders appear to contain everything they are supposed to, other folders that should contain files are empty. And when I select all of the folders instead of the entire memory stick, it shows only 17GB used. So 34GB of files are missing.

What I've tried:

Based on my online research, I tried several things.

  • On the chance that the files had become hidden, I executed this command:

    attrib –h –r –s /s /d g:*.*

    That had no effect.

  • On the chance that malware was involved, I installed Malwarebytes and scanned the system. It found some infected files and deleted them, but I still have the problem. It's possible the infections were coincidental. Based on my activity, the infected files could have been there when the stick was still behaving normally.

  • I checked the Recycle Bin and found nothing there.

What can I do to find or recover the missing files?

fixer1234
  • 28,064
Mezgeen Dosky
  • 19

2 Answers2

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There are 2 imperfections in the command you'd shown.

  1. As the find pattern is *.* it will affect only to files that contains an extension (or folders that contains a dot). Use * pattern instead, that will match possible files that does not have a file extension.

  2. The path syntax is wrong, you missed to add a backslash.

This is the proper command to unhide files:

Attrib –H –R –S /S /D "G:\*"
ElektroStudios
  • 1,700
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You probably (but not necessarily) have a bad drive. You should copy your files off asap. If you randomly get errors on certain files mentioning the wrong disk being in the drive then your drive will very soon become read-only and later die completely. The best way to copy a ton of files is using ROBOCOPY. Open a new command window (you can use Win+Rand type cmd in the Run... box) and then run these commands:

cd %USERPROFILE%\documents
mkdir dump
robocopy /mir /r:2 X:\ dump

replacing X: with you drives path. After a while of copying you will have all of your non-corrupt files in a folder called dump in your documents. r:2 is important because robocopy will retry a failed copy one million times before giving up by default, which means over a year with the standard 30 second delay.

SilentVoid
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