chkdsk e: /r with WIN 7 nuked my drives...

[Hermskii]

I'm at work. The HR Director's PC started rebooting over and over. All cooling fans are on and the room is cool so I suspect the HDD or the the OS. I took the drive out and hooked it up to my PC through a univeral adaptor that plugs into my PC via a USB port.

I started up my PC and I see the extra drive and can see the folders in it and everything. I went into the command prompt and told it to do this:

chkdsk e: /r

That should just check the disk for problems, fix files and try to recover bad sectors. At the end of stage 5 it gives me a error saying a unspecified error has occurred. Now, I can't see in the drive at all. It doesn't even list how big it is. It is just a drive letter.

I got another drive and did the exact same thing to check it for errors before I formatted it to ues as a replacement drive. The same think hahppened again! At stage 5 I got that error and while I can still see the drive letter listed in "My Computer", I can't access the drive nor see any files on it. This is exactly what happened to the HR Director's drive. Any ideas how to recover either of these drives?

If I go to disk management, it sees the drive but tells me I need to initialize it. If I try that it tells me the drive is not ready. I'm stuck. Help. Thanks! I'm on a Windows 7 Business computer.

 

[Nothinman]

Something else has to be wrong, my first guess would've been that the HR director's drive was already dying and the stress from chkdsk pushed it over the edge but with the second drive having the same issue I'd say the USB adapter is corrupting data.

 

[Hardlin]

Something else has to be wrong, my first guess would've been that the HR director's drive was already dying and the stress from chkdsk pushed it over the edge but with the second drive having the same issue I'd say the USB adapter is corrupting data.

I would agree that there's something with the USB adapter. It's generally not a good idea to just run a chkdsk with the /r option until you have a backup of the data or you have no other options available to you. There may be no way to get the data back without a utility that can do partition repairs or sector level data recovery.

It may be easier to just blow away the drive and restore from backup.

 

[JonathanYoung]

Before you try anything too drastic I suggest putting the drive into another computer or using another USB adapter, or even disconnecting and reconnecting the existing USB adapter.

This situation occurred to me when I was trying to image my laptop HD for upgrading. Disk Management asked to initialize my existing laptop HD and I freaked out thinking that I had somehow destroyed the drive when I removed it from the laptop. Shutting everything off and trying again showed that it was the USB adapter that was causing the problem.

 

[Nothinman]

Before you try anything too drastic I suggest putting the drive into another computer or using another USB adapter, or even disconnecting and reconnecting the existing USB adapter.

This situation occurred to me when I was trying to image my laptop HD for upgrading. Disk Management asked to initialize my existing laptop HD and I freaked out thinking that I had somehow destroyed the drive when I removed it from the laptop. Shutting everything off and trying again showed that it was the USB adapter that was causing the problem.

True, the adapter may have gotten confused to the point where it's returning corrupt/zero'd data to the host even though the data's still fine on the drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

True, the adapter may have gotten confused to the point where it's returning corrupt/zero'd data to the host even though the data's still fine on the drive.

But if it was doing that, and CHKDSK was run with the /R switch, it may have gone and corrupted the HD further.

 

[Nothinman]

But if it was doing that, and CHKDSK was run with the /R switch, it may have gone and corrupted the HD further.

With "may" being the key word in that sentence. Which is why he should plug it in directly via the SATA/PATA port to see what that says.

 

[RebateMonger]

With "may" being the key word in that sentence. Which is why he should plug it in directly via the SATA/PATA port to see what that says.

Yeah, that's what I'd do at this point. Then the O.P. will likely want to perform a data recovery on the disk (copying the data to another disk) using one of the many data recovery tools available.

Edit: If Windows still wants to initialize the disk, then you need to run data recovery software on the host PC to sort out that disk. DO NOT initialize or partition or format the disk.

 

[Hermskii]

OK folks. I have to agree. It has to be the USB adaptor or something odd like that. I will plug it in directly tomorrow and try a few things. I'll come back here and let you know what happens. Have a great day folks and thanks again for you replies!

 

[Modelworks]

Image the drive before you do anything else to it.

 

[Hermskii]

I'm sorry for the delay in responding back like I said I would to this. Yes, it was the USB adaptor. Not all of the time but certainly most of the time when connected to my Win 7 professional PC it would not be able to show there were files or anything on a hard drive. I resorted to only using it on computers with XP Pro on them and it works fine on them basically every time! As far doing chkdsk command with it, I also only do it on a Win XP machine and all is well. I was snever able to recover the drives BTW. Odd thing this was.