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Corrupt hard drive has shrunk

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damoncrane

Junior Member
So I was happily tinkering and surfing the other day listening to something on itunes, lovingly arranging my digi-vinyl. All of a sudden, poof. Error writing to Drive X: or something like that, kept repeating the error messsage. The hard drive was in a USB external case, I think it probably got too hot as I doubt the case is too good at cooling. It crashed and burned leaving a stream of errors. The hard drive was now being seen as a malfunctioning USB hub!? I tried some quick fixes that possibly made things worse.

I took the drive out of its case and put it into the computer directly on the IDE cable (forgive me if I use incorrect technical terms, I'm a dabbling amateur). The drive was still not working, I think I may have been freakin' as the rest is a bit of a blur. I know I read a help reply somewhere that said delete the partition, make a new partition to correct the file table then use a data recovery package.

The long and short is the drive now appears in windows XP sp2 as 30gb rather than 120gb, I have removed the partition, and tried to add a new partition but it won't see the full drive. I have used a data recovery program which also recognised 30gb and have recoverd about 10gb of data. Unfortunately this still leaves another 50gb data unaccounted. I am still hopeful that with the help of you wonderful people my data will not be lost. The reason for this is that I used a different recovery program which detected all the lost files, in their original file structure including the original drive size, but when it came to recovering the data the program crashed out.

The drive is a 120GB Samsung SV1203N. Fortunately/Unfortunately it was my data storage drive, meaning my computer is still fully functional, but the important data is buried.

Anybody got any ideas? Thanks.

 
Have you run a scandisk on the drive to repair the directory? It MIGHT be readable after that.

Also download the drive manufacturer's drive diagnostic and run it. It might repair the damage. The drive is probably crashed and unusable, but you may get more data off it.

 
The help reply to change partitions may have been malicious. Once a partition is deleted all data is lost within that partition.

You may use your data recovery software to undelete any changes to the partition. Recover all deleted data within partitions. Then run chkdsk in DOS. Please hit F8 when you see the winxp startup screen and select boot to DOS or use your winxp boot disk to get into DOS but it must be able to recognize your data drive and have chkdsk on floppy disk. At the prompt type:

c:\chkdsk (drive) /p/r

Chkdsk will check the specified drive to repair or recover data. /p will correct any errors and /r locates bad sectors and recovers readable information.

If you suspect there is physical damage to the hard disk platter then you can use:
c:\scandisk (drive) /autofix

I hope this helps. Good luck!
 
Originally posted by: Kane
If you suspect there is physical damage to the hard disk platter then you can use:
c:\scandisk (drive) /autofix
Click to expand...

Scandisk is an obsolete utility that does not ship with Windows 2000 or XP.
 
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