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Corrupted Hard Drive, how do I recover?

E

Earwax

Senior member
I bumped an external drive while I was doing a file transfer, and the drive crashed.

The files are still on the drive, but explorer can't see them. Also, for some reason windows thinks the drive is an active partition.

Can anyone recommend a free/shareware program to get access to the files. They're really important to me.

Thanks...
 
Maybe this is the wrong question to ask, but how hard did you bump it exactly? What kind of drive is it?

These sorts of questions might help people give you more accurate answers. For what it's worth, I've had the freezer trick work when this 250 I had went bad on me. It was internal though, so YMMV.
 
It's an old maxtor 30GB IDE drive with all my mp3s on it. I had it in an external adaptor case, feeding it into my computer via firewire. I didn't bump the drive hard or anything. The power chord was loose, and I bumped it slightly on my way out of my room, causing the power to cut off during the transfer.

When I rebooted, the drive read as 96% full, but there was only a folder called "RECYCLED" on the drive. The drive volume name also changed from "MUSIC DISK" to "LOCAL DISK."

Could I try running fixmbr through the recovery console, or is that only for bootable drives? This drive has always been a secondary slave and has never been the active partition in my system. It's not broken into any partitions, just one whole 30GB drive with mp3 files and some archived documents on it.

The drive appears to be completely healthy, I just can't access the data on it through windows. Seems like the partition into, or the boot sector on the drive is to blame. I just don't know how to fix it.


Thanks
 
Well, I have about 85% of the music on my ipod, so I can rip it. I just don't want to go through that hassle. The documents on the drive, however, do not have any backups that I know of. I was copying them expressly so I could burn them.

I wouldn't say they are worth $90 though. I can always try to dig up some hardcopies. I'm just looking for an easy way to recover the data.

Fixmbr won't work? Is there an MS-DOS utility I could use? All the data is on the drive, windows just can't index it.
 
I just got Partition Magic and Ghost yesterday in a bundle. I had an unallocated, lost partition on a 250 gig WD Caviar filled with video, shns, flacs, mp3's. Partition Magic fixed it in 5 minutes. Great, great program. hth.
 
I also have Partition Magic. It didn't work, but it did remind me about chkdsk. I ran chkdsk and WinXP converted all of my lost files into *.CHK files. I'm copying to files to my new hard drive, and I'm gonna try to recover them with a program called "UnChck" Hopefully it'll work.

Thanks
 
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