Urgently need to recover chkdsked files

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.

 

Probably better back up whatever you can before using utilities on it. See if you can make an image.

Where do you put a 130GB image if you have limited drive space?

I suggest you get some sort of back up that you can reinstall if your efforts fail. You need to get back to as close to the original as possible to start again.

Matt