So, long story short. My HDD is acting strange. It's an internal HDD in an external enclosure. Basically, Some of my files I can't even see on the drive anymore. I can open a few files, and others seem corrupted. Opening them in a hex editor shows that data has shifted. I have bits of movies in image files, bits of image files in movies, it's just a scrambled mess. I've ran chkdsk, file/partition recovery software, I've even tried Spinrite but that freaks out as the drive is 1 TB. SMART is fine, chkdsk is fine, I don't know what to do... Is there anything I can do to repair or recover some of these files? It's pretty much a full terabyte of data, and losing all of it would be unfavourable to say the least. tl;dr, help.
It's extremely likely that you're just completely flat out of luck. That level of corruption with that much data is a nightmare to fix and the only thing I do is just give up on it, if nothing that can be easily replaced that was never on it. It's probably because of the internal hard drive being in an external closure that it maybe happening for some reason. Being that either you just put in there with files without formatting it in it's new enclosure. Or the enclosure somehow doesn't work with the hard drive quite right. Or something with the logic boards is malfunctioning. Or you're using bad utilities for maintaining the drive. Didn't safely eject it. The list could go on for why it's happening.
There shouldn't be any need to format a hard drive in an enclosure, it should just work no matter how you access it. Other than that I'm in agreement with Chibisteven. Unfortunate as it may be, I say cut your losses and backup as much uncorrupted data as possible. Terabyte drives are remarkably affordable these days. I picked up a 2TB external HDD for less than $100, and that was nearly a year ago. I'd also avoid Spinrite even if it did work, my own experience has been that it's bullshit and does more harm than good, if any good at all. Basically the more you use the drive now, the more it's likely to trash your data.
Unfortunately, there are a few somewhat large (200 MB~) files I have on there that I'd like to recover. I'm not so worried about the drive as I am about the files on there. I'm just not sure what to try to recover them. Is there anything that can remove the file table and look for files as a whole? I think my mistake was originally running CHKDSK and I think Windows pieced together the files wrong. I'm really new at all this recovery stuff
I'll vouch for TestDisk. I've had success with it in the past after inadvertently deleting an important partition. I don't remember how I managed that, but I was incredibly happy that I was able to restore it.
Last time I had a problem like that, I was using a green label drive for everyday use. If your drive is a green one, you need to only use it for backup, not everyday use, or it gives "weird" problems, even though the drive tests fine in every other way.
Your original mistake was not having a backup of your important files somewhere else. If you can afford it, perhaps Dropbox would be useful. Or if you have another computer in the house, Bittorrent Sync could help you sync files between the two machines. Windows also has some "set it and forget it" backup features built in.
This drive was my backup drive. I had a copy of this stuff on megaupload, and my originals went when the original seagate drive took a dump.
I have a Green SATA drive as primary use one and I don't have problems with corruption. Speed not being that great for very demanding tasks that use a lot of hard disk, but for basic everyday things it holds up just fine. The thing is certainly quiet.
All the external bays I've used completely flipped the fuck out on any filesystem error. Remove it from the bay and connect it natively. THEN see what you can recover. WD Greens are okay, but you have to remove the head parking (not just minimize it - disable it completely), or else they will kill themselves fast.
