Urgently need to recover chkdsked files

[Biovore]

Hey guys, I am in huge trouble.

I work at a school, and I put about 130 gigs worth of teachers files, which are highly important, onto an external drive that is 250 gigs. I was going to back it up, but since its the holidays I was in a rush to get every lab re-imaged. Our department had some guys in doing work experience, and one of them was using the external drive to ping image some machines. He apparently corrupted it somehow, and then chkdsked the drive.

When I had a look at it, the drive partition was apparently only 70 gigs or so, and it was about 50 gigs full. Every file was 0 kilobytes. I tried some recovery tools, but they didn't find anything. I tried some uncheckdsk tools, but they didn't work, and I assume its because none of the files have a .CHK extension and there is no found000 folder.

I haven't told the head yet, as I wanted to look this up over the weekends. I don't know what to do, and the work experience guys are gone now because school starts in a couple of days.

I really need that data, please tell me there is some way of restoring it?

Cheers.

[glc]

The first thing I'd do is pull the drive out of the housing to make sure it's not the interface card that's causing the issue. Then, your only chance is some good data recovery software.