recover data from .chk files on external WD drive

luvinit

Hi,
I have a serious problem with my western digital external hard drive that is less than a year old. About a week ago, I plugged it into my work laptop with Vista on it. It popped up a dialog box saying there seems to be a problem with the drive and did I want to scan and fix the errors. I clicked yes and let it scan. When I went to look at my drive afterwards, I realized the majority of my files had disappeared. When I checked the properties of the drive, I could see that the space that my files had taken up (47GB) was still used. I eventually located a Found.000 folder on the drive with 40GB of files named filexxxx.chk.

Can anyone tell me how to recover my files from chk files? I renamed one of the files .jpeg and could see that it was one of my photos so the data is still there I think. I think the hard drive itself is still dodgy because it is very slow to move between directories and I can't seem to copy anything off of it - Tried to copy the whole found.000 dir.

If someone could please recommend a software to recover the data ( I don't mind paying for good software), it would be great. Also do you think the disk is on the way out completely?

Thanks in advance.

Mr. Fancypants

There are a few free options linked from here http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/01/07/how-to-recover-chk-files-created-by-chkdsk-and-scandisk/

It is possible that the disk is on the way out or just that it wasn't removed correctly from the pc the last time you used it. You can get Western Digital Diagnostic software here : http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=303&sid=3&lang=en