external hard drive gone to heaven........

[briann532]

My external hard drive just decided to go to heaven.

Thankfully I backed up all my business stuff and photos, but I never back up movies as it just takes up too much space.
I had a sh1tload of them and lots of series that I have collected over the years.
About 1.5 TB worth.

Whenever I try to connect to it, I get asked to "format the drive".
I'm trying to use a data recovery tool my new PC came with, but I'm not holding my breath.
Usually anything microsoft just creps itself and I lose it.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Thank the beer gods, I back up the important stuff to another hard drive as well as a sector on one of my 2 internal drives.............

Sadly
Brian

[noel_w]

You may still have the data on the drive. Don't do anything drastic just yet.
Couple of scenarios here.
From what you have said it may have just lost the partition table. The data may still be all there.
Also if may just be the usb interface playing up.
I have had a couple of external usb's do this recently and it has just been the missing the partition table. Easy fix with the correct software.
One of the drives worked on another PC with another SATA to USB interface. (That was strange)
All may not be lost.

[achjimmy]

Try accessing it from another PC.  I was told once that those portable external drives are the most unreliable HDD you can use. I have for many years now stored everything on a Ready Nas that also uses raid (2 disk) I can easily remove a drive to take with me and I uses a tenth of the other sh1t it can do.

[Bird]

theres some good hard drive recovery software out there I got my last lot off Fosi website.

[briann532]

Thanks for the tips guy..........
 

I will regrettably have to do it after the weekend as I'm off to Coffs Harbour in the morning.
(Any thieves thinking of dropping by, no it hasn't already been robbed, we've just been busy the last week  )

First Easter in 22 years that I haven't been camping. Opal Cove resort this time................
Not sure I'm up to it, but the boss insisted. We'll be catching up with some old 4B friends we haven't seen in a while.
Last time we caught up we were kicked out of the underground motel restaurant in White Cliffs for being too loud and dancing on the tables.........
Better be good this time

 

Cheers all, and thanks.
Have a top Easter.

Brian

[Bird]

I usually leave mine running over a weekend with a fan infront of it. they can take 18-48 hours to read depending on data, so just be prepared for it to be slow.

[MrCruza]

Highly recomend this mob....   Easeus

I have the pro version and it's rescued a few drives for me.

[achjimmy]

Enjoy opal cove Brian. Used to be a good relaxed resort.

[prodigyrf]

Yep had the same thing with a couple of portable drives and I suspect USB power is inadequate sometimes particularly with large capacity drives 1TB+ and recognition goes kaput somehow.When you search 'cannot recognise hard disk drive' you'll get the picture.

If you go into Control Panel and check hardware and then HDDs you often see it identified and it shows it's working but you get nothing showing in My Computer in which case re labelling the drive will do it. I'm thinking of using a powered(ie 12V 3 A) external HDD for backups in future rather than USB (5V ?ma) portables as the latter don't cut it except for flash drives.

[prodigyrf]

Just remembered I had a prob with a Seagate Goflex Freeagent drive not recognising and even when I allocated another drive number and could see it, it prompted to format and it will do that if the drive has a bad sector. Cured it with checkdisk and immediately the
Goflex Freeagent icon appeared again in My Computer. Here's the procedure-

1. Click Start, select Run.
2. In the 'Open' box, type cmd
3. Click Ok.
4. Run the chkdsk utility by typing in the following command:
chkdsk c: /f /r
NOTE: the /f command automatically fixes any errors encountered, the /r command locates bad sectors and recovers readable information
5. A reboot is normally required for the Chkdsk program to lock the disk and run correctly, so simply restart the computer and Chkdsk will run automatically. When it's finished, (This process can take quite a while depending on the size of your disk, etc.), it will boot back to normal Windows.

note the spaces before / in the command line and be aware of the different commands-
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true

[glipschitz]

Get yourself a copy of Spinrite - www.grc.com


It's a brilliant piece of software that runs agains the disk at a very low level.


I've rescued many many hard drives with this software from iPod's with university exams to a basic boot sector that's got corrupted.


Longest I've had it running was about 4 1/2 months but it rescued the drive


Cheers,


Greg

[prodigyrf]

Thanks for that tip on Spinrite and I'll bear it in mind.

Recall now when I had probs with a near new Seagate external drive I started here-
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/194531en
and came up to pace with the various problems. Also references their Seatools diagnostic but it was running checkdisk that found a glitch and repaired it and immediately recognised and accessed all the data perfectly since. As I recall it was another WD disk drive that needed reassigning a drive letter to work again as the Seagate site shows. I doubt your whole drive is inaccessible or recoverable but some glitch like mine was. Whatever you do don't format it or repartition it though.

Interesting that the Spinrite site mentions how makers are jamming more info on discs and that seems to be more problematic now and perhaps even more so with low powered USB external drives. As the man said we stick a lot on one drive nowadays and there's something about lots of eggs in one basket.

[glipschitz]

The external drives are usually just a 3.5" Desktop SATA or 2.5" Laptop SATA HDD with a USB controller slapped on the back of them.


I know Seagate are getting sneaky and making the USB3 2.5" ones now with a USB Connector straight on the back of the drive which makes it really hard when the controller Shits itself or you want to plug in to a PC via SATA.


If it is just a SATA disk, your best bet is to crack it open and plug the disk in to the motherboard rather than interfacing over USB. It's much faster to diagnose and the disk is accessed directly so the error correction / detection is more accurate.


Cheers,


Greg