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I have a laptop with Ubuntu as the main OS. Inside Ubuntu I use VMware Workstation on which I have a Windows 7 VM. Inside this Win7 VM I used a USB drive to store some important data. I moved the data from the VM to the USB drive, powered off the VM, powered off the laptop, unplugged the USB drive and put it in my PC which also runs Kubuntu. In my PC the the files on the USB won't show up (in the file explorer). If I issue "ls -larth /path/to/my/usb" the files appear as corrupted or something; I don't remember exactly the message.

I unplugged the USB drive from the Kubuntu PC and put it back into the Win7 VM to find out that the files are gone (won't appear in explorer). At this point I said "Aw, shucks". I used chkdsk /f :e to repair the files on the USB drive. chkdsk told me: "first allocation unit is not valid. The entry will be truncated. Convert lost chains to files (Y/N) ?" Here I answered "Y". After this I looked on the USB drive and there were no files there. What can I do in this situation?

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  • or something? I don’t remember exactly the message?
    – Scott - Слава Україні
    Commented Jul 27, 2018 at 0:39
  • Yes, i did it the orthodox way.
    – Andrei
    Commented Jul 31, 2018 at 13:09

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The files are probably still there, but their connection to the file system has been lost, so you won't be able to access them using the standard Windows tools. At this point, don't do anything else to the USB drive (especially writing to it or trying to repair again!), because Windows current doesn't think that there's any data so it could easily overwrite something.

At this point, there are two things you can try:

  1. Filesystem recovery: There are programs that will look for filesystem structures on-disk and try to reattach files to the directory structure: depending on the amount of use, this can be very effective, or it might do nothing. Usually the programs have an option to recover the files to another drive, so it's fairly safe. I've found TestDisk to be really good (and it's free!)

  2. File recovery: These are programs that ignore filesystem structures completely and instead look for file patterns instead. This has a benefit of not needing to know anything about a filesystem, and can find files that filesystem recovery cannot. However, it can be very slow, so do this after trying other options! I use PhotoRec for situations like this (same company as TestDisk!)

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  • Thanks Erik , eventually i managed to recovered the files or to be more specific the content i needed from them . The second time i plugged the USB drive into the windows VM i saw the files that were generated after i issued the chkdsk command which were the original files somewhat modified , truncated maybe , but i was able to open them with notepad and copy from them what i needed .
    – Andrei
    Commented Jul 31, 2018 at 13:18

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