Forum Discussion
Possible to recover deleted files from external hard drive on Windows 11 PC?
Once you've realized you've deleted important files, stop using the external hard drive right away. The more you use it, the higher the chance that the deleted files will get overwritten, and that's a nightmare.
Recovering deleted files from external hard drive can take some time, especially if you have a lot of data on the drive. Check out this post that helped me last week:
https://www.uuwinfox.com/retrieve-lost-files
JBarrol Windows 11 has a built-in command line to help you recover deleted files from external hard drives. It is free but the process is a bit complictated.
Step 1: Run chkdsk to check and repair the external HDDr.
chkdsk E: /f
Step 2: Use attrib to unhide files from external hard drive.
attrib -h -r -s /s /d E:\*.*
Step 3: Recover deleted files with the recover command.
recover E:\filename
Replace E: with the drive letter of your external hard drive and filename with the name of the file you want to recover. Note that recover works on a per-file basis and may not recover all files successfully.