Oh man, I'm so relieved right now. I was able to fix a brand new external SSD drive that somehow got corrupted.
Let me start from the top. I bought a new external ssd drive recently for my new laptop, and it was pretty expensive - 4 TB - and after using it to store a lot of my steam games and other programs for my new computer, then all of a sudden today it said "This drive is corrupted and unreadable". What the heck?
At first, I was thinking maybe because I had been torrenting stuff recently (for the first time on my new computer) but it was just a couple of movies, and I always use a VPN and scan the files for viruses before opening them. So I don't know how downloading a torrent from the most well known and safe torrent site around, and how it could have corrupted my external drive. But then maybe I was thinking it was because I loaded an old edition of Quicken (2008) to the drive that isn't compatible with windows 11, and then when I plugged it in to my laptop, I noticed the quicken program disappeared off the external drive. So maybe that messed up the drive? I then tried using the drive on my old laptop - nope, same message, the drive is "unreadable and corrupt". Uh-oh. And then there were no options to check errors when I right clicked on it neither.
I don't know what was wrong, but then I did a search on what to do, and somehow was lucky enough to find an awesome article written by a tech expert guy, and they said the first thing you should do is run chkdisc on the external drive. I had no idea you can run chkdisc on an external ssd drive, did you? This is news to me. Anyway, it worked like a charm, and right after it started checking, it said "Deleting corrupt attribute record" and then later it also said,
"Correcting errors in the Master File Table (MFT) mirror.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) DATA attribute.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap. Windows has made corrections to the file system. No further action is required."
And it was very quick too, like maybe one minute to fix the drive. I was amazed. And I didn't have to reboot or anything, all my files were back, and the drive is working normally! Saved me a bunch of hassle (sending the external ssd back to amazon for a refund, buying another one to replace it, downloading all my files again that were on the drive, etc.) Whew!
Let me start from the top. I bought a new external ssd drive recently for my new laptop, and it was pretty expensive - 4 TB - and after using it to store a lot of my steam games and other programs for my new computer, then all of a sudden today it said "This drive is corrupted and unreadable". What the heck?
At first, I was thinking maybe because I had been torrenting stuff recently (for the first time on my new computer) but it was just a couple of movies, and I always use a VPN and scan the files for viruses before opening them. So I don't know how downloading a torrent from the most well known and safe torrent site around, and how it could have corrupted my external drive. But then maybe I was thinking it was because I loaded an old edition of Quicken (2008) to the drive that isn't compatible with windows 11, and then when I plugged it in to my laptop, I noticed the quicken program disappeared off the external drive. So maybe that messed up the drive? I then tried using the drive on my old laptop - nope, same message, the drive is "unreadable and corrupt". Uh-oh. And then there were no options to check errors when I right clicked on it neither.
I don't know what was wrong, but then I did a search on what to do, and somehow was lucky enough to find an awesome article written by a tech expert guy, and they said the first thing you should do is run chkdisc on the external drive. I had no idea you can run chkdisc on an external ssd drive, did you? This is news to me. Anyway, it worked like a charm, and right after it started checking, it said "Deleting corrupt attribute record" and then later it also said,
"Correcting errors in the Master File Table (MFT) mirror.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) DATA attribute.
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap. Windows has made corrections to the file system. No further action is required."
And it was very quick too, like maybe one minute to fix the drive. I was amazed. And I didn't have to reboot or anything, all my files were back, and the drive is working normally! Saved me a bunch of hassle (sending the external ssd back to amazon for a refund, buying another one to replace it, downloading all my files again that were on the drive, etc.) Whew!