Corrupted Hard Drive

[ng12345]

I have a maxtor onetouch iii 750gb external hard drive that I was using for backups -- it is always connected to the computer via usb and always turned on. yesterday I was trying to access it and windows said the hard drive has become corrupted or inaccessible.

in disk management the partition is listed as a healthy ntfs partition but it can not be mounted

can't run chkdsk on it (says the hard drive is inaccessible).

i saw some other posts on here about active partition recovery -- it is currently doing a superscan on the drive but hasn't found any files or partitions so far.

the one thing I did notice in active partition recovery is that the hard drive is listed as having 425gb, with a 686gb partition -- could this be the cause of the failure? is there anyway to get the hard drive reporting the correct size (and match the partition).

are there other programs that you would suggest to recover the files?

 

[airhendrix13]

GetDataBack for NTFS is what I used and it worked perfectly.

 

[ng12345]

thanks for the quick reply -- it is currently scanning -- 8 hours to go

it looks like all my files are intact but the boot sector/partition table got messed up somehow -- is there a program that can assess and repair that? i tried testdisk with poor results

 

[airhendrix13]

I'm not sure about that one. I used GetDataBack to transfer my files to an external HDD, reinstalled my OS on a new HDD, then transfered the files back over. I'm sure there is something out there that will fix the table, but I don't have an answer for you unfortunetly.

 

[ng12345]

thanks again for your help -- what i ended up doing is deleting the partition, quick formatting a new one of the same size as ntfs and then running getdataback again. the first time since the table was messed up, it only found a 32gb partition on a 750gb drive and didn't show half the files. now it is showing them all -- and the drive is working normally again. only thing is i dont know how reliable the drive is anymore.

edit: looks like i still lost about 280gb of backups -- only 64gb was recovered by getdataback the second time around -- while getdataback shows that 280gb of information is on the drive, it only recognized file headers for 64gb of it :/

 

[John P]

File Scavenger has worked miracles for me in the past, absolutely fantastic program.

Free download and it will show what files it can recover, gotta pay to actually recover them.

File Scavenger Link

I have to add that Quetek has great customer service. I had an older version (2.0) and hadn't actually used the program in some time. I emailed them to see if I could re-download it and get a new license (I had my old license info), they emailed me back in less than 10 minutes. I was able to reinstall it and recover my dad's *.pst file from a corrupted hard drive. I tried 3 other programs (recuva, etc...) and they wouldn't even read the drive at all.

 

[CKent]

I found this thread when doing a search. I realize every situation is different so I'm not claiming one option is better than the other, but File Scavenger found nothing for me. GetDataBack (after a 23 hour scan) allowed me to recover important data and irreplacable photos including the last taken of my grandmother who passed away in 2004. I'm still kicking myself for not redundantly backing them up, but at least I have them back now.

What happened was my backup drive died while transferring data back to my main drive after a reinstall. It had to be a complete drive wipe, since I was doing a dual boot install and had to create multiple partitions. Relying on a single point of failure, and having it follow Murphy's Law and fail me, is what killed me. Anyway, thanks guys for the suggestions, even though I'm not the OP.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: John P
File Scavenger has worked miracles for me in the past, absolutely fantastic program.

I like File Scavenger also. It's straight forward and gets the job done (if it can be done).

 

[ng12345]

just to follow up -- i ended up losing all of my data; I reformmated and scanned the drive and it is showing no bad sectors -- don't know if I can trust it though :-/

the hd was on 24/7 before, I think it may have overheated

 

[Roguestar]

Get yourself an external powered enclosure that has good airflow and a fan.

 

[lxskllr]

In addition to Roguestar's suggestion, I would suggest not leaving a backup drive plugged in all the time. The way I see it, a HD has a finite number of spins, and the arm will move a finite amount of times. Every time it performs one of those actions without doing any real work, you're losing life off of the drive without any benefit.

I may just be paranoid, but I also prefer to keep my backup drive off of the computer when I'm not backing up. I figure any localized electric anomaly could take out my computer, and the backup drive with it. If your going to keep it hooked up all of the time, you might as well get a internal drive and benefit from the increased speed.

 

[ng12345]

yah the only issue was the backups were occurring early in the AM since the rest of the time the server is being used pretty heavily. was considering online backups -- but right now it is just being backed up to several other computers