Hard Drive is unreadable or unaccessible, How to fix?

[JoyfulNoise]

Hello everyone,

I have two external hard drives. Not sure how this happened, but both of them are not accessible or readable. Possible corruption. When I try to access both external hard drives it gives me an access is denied. One of them gives me an additional message that states: The parameter is incorrect. I also got a message before that it was corrupted and unreadable. I don't remember where that message popped up though. One external HDD I can see my original drive name, but the other external HDD was turned into a raw drive.

I used a program called EaseUS Data Recovery to recover my data. Not sure if it recovered all, but I think most of it.

Is there anyway or procedure I can try that could make both external hard drives accessible again? Any other information you guys need please ask and I will do my best to answer.

Thank you very much for all your help. Crossing all my fingers that i can get this resolved.

 

[CiPHER]

First read the SMART data before doing anything else. Try CrystalDiskInfo and post a screenshot here with all attributes being visible. In particular, Current Pending Sector (Bad sectors) and UDMA CRC Error Count (Cabling errors) are important.

 

[Elixer]

http://C:\Users\JEFF EPSTEIN\Desktop\Drive 1 on F.PNG

http://C:\Users\JEFF EPSTEIN\Desktop\Drive 2 on G.PNG

You can't attach pictures like that, you need a image host, something like http://postimg.org/.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

First read the SMART data before doing anything else. Try CrystalDiskInfo and post a screenshot here with all attributes being visible. In particular, Current Pending Sector (Bad sectors) and UDMA CRC Error Count (Cabling errors) are important.

Thank you so much CiPHER for your time and assistance. I do apologize, I tried to attach an image, but I didn't know how. Thanks to Elixer now I did. Here is the link that will show the CrystalDiskInfo information as well as chkdsk that I learned to do.

Also, I need to learn how to read the SMART data, so I won't be of help with that at this point.

https://postimg.org/gallery/fq6vkf4k/

 

[JoyfulNoise]

You can't attach pictures like that, you need a image host, something like http://postimg.org/.

Thank you Elixer for your help and assistance. I couldn't find away to add them and tried with option that was here. Sorry about that. Thank you for the link. I did upload them here as posted above.

https://postimg.org/gallery/fq6vkf4k/

The only thing is, is this site safe? My security program is giving me a revoked certificate and untrustworthy etc. warning.

Thank you again!

 

[Elixer]

This drive's SMART stats looks fine...

as does this one...

However, since you have corruption going on, I would format (not quick, full), then once that is done, I would make a archive out of ~1GB of files (could be of anything), then copy that to the drive you just formatted.
Now you use 7zip or winrar or whatever to run a archive check on this file. If no errors, copy that same file to the drive a few times, and test each one of the archives again.
Assume no errors, this drive is good to go.

No idea how it became corrupted in the first place if it has no errors, could be malware though,
If you do get errors at any point, then it could be RAM errors, or even CPU issues, and requires more testing.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

This drive's SMART stats looks fine...

as does this one...

However, since you have corruption going on, I would format (not quick, full), then once that is done, I would make a archive out of ~1GB of files (could be of anything), then copy that to the drive you just formatted.
Now you use 7zip or winrar or whatever to run a archive check on this file. If no errors, copy that same file to the drive a few times, and test each one of the archives again.
Assume no errors, this drive is good to go.

No idea how it became corrupted in the first place if it has no errors, could be malware though,
If you do get errors at any point, then it could be RAM errors, or even CPU issues, and requires more testing.

Thank you so much Elixer for your time and assistance. That is good to know these drives are fine, but how do you know if a drive is about to go bad or starting too? What would the results show on the S.M.A.R.T results that would tell me this? So, I know for the future. How did you post the images?

Thank you for this idea of making an archive and testing it on the HDD. I was thinking it was malware too. I own WinRAR, so I will use that. Before I do that and even though I did data recovery, I am not going to format the drives just yet, because, on Black Friday, I am going to purchase a docking station along with 2 internal hard drives for redundant image backups of the recovered files. I also want to make a bootable drive using the Ultimate Boot CD, so I can see if I can view any files in I guess it is called DOS mode, I am not sure of the name to describe it of the corrupted hard drives. I want to make sure if there were any other files I can find that wasn't found by the recovery program.

I post my results of everything as I complete each process. If you have any other ideas etc., please don't hesistate to post. I appreciate your time and help. Thank you so much again!!!!!!

 

[Elixer]

Thank you so much Elixer for your time and assistance. That is good to know these drives are fine, but how do you know if a drive is about to go bad or starting too? What would the results show on the S.M.A.R.T results that would tell me this? So, I know for the future. How did you post the images?

Thank you for this idea of making an archive and testing it on the HDD. I was thinking it was malware too. I own WinRAR, so I will use that. Before I do that and even though I did data recovery, I am not going to format the drives just yet, because, on Black Friday, I am going to purchase a docking station along with 2 internal hard drives for redundant image backups of the recovered files. I also want to make a bootable drive using the Ultimate Boot CD, so I can see if I can view any files in I guess it is called DOS mode, I am not sure of the name to describe it of the corrupted hard drives. I want to make sure if there were any other files I can find that wasn't found by the recovery program.

I post my results of everything as I complete each process. If you have any other ideas etc., please don't hesistate to post. I appreciate your time and help. Thank you so much again!!!!!!

For images, you just upload to a site, copy the URL they give you, and paste that between the IMG tags.
For SSDs, if you keep using crystaldiskinfo (set it to run at startup with a delay of 30-60s), then it will tell you when something is wrong.

When SSDs show sign of corruption, I tend to secure erase them first (with the utility supplied by whomever made the SSD), then once that is done, I do the corruption test I outlined before with rar, and once that is done, I secure erase it another time, and then proceed to install whatever on it.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

For images, you just upload to a site, copy the URL they give you, and paste that between the IMG tags.
For SSDs, if you keep using crystaldiskinfo (set it to run at startup with a delay of 30-60s), then it will tell you when something is wrong.

When SSDs show sign of corruption, I tend to secure erase them first (with the utility supplied by whomever made the SSD), then once that is done, I do the corruption test I outlined before with rar, and once that is done, I secure erase it another time, and then proceed to install whatever on it.

Thank you again. I appreciate it. Can I do this method with crystaldiskinfo with regular internal and external HDD'S as well?

 

[Ranulf]

Just fyi, no warning for me with Postimage's site via Malwarebytes. Good luck with drive recovery etc..

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Just fyi, no warning for me with Postimage's site via Malwarebytes. Good luck with drive recovery etc..

Thank you Ranulf for your input. Interesting! I am using ESET Smart Security. If I have sometime later I will check it out further. Thank you for the encouragement. I hope you are having a great week so far.

 

[Muse]

I'm having a similar problem with my Western Digital Elements 2TB USB HD. Gone RAW suddenly when I asked Windows Tools to fix errors, whoops! Here's the thread I posted, so far no one's replied but me:

2TB external USB HD unreadable -- "RAW"

 

[C1]

I experienced an external drive go RAW recently too. I was doing some hardware testing/evaluation requiring frequent shutdowns/restarts.

Pretty sure the RAW was caused by drive experiencing a cable disconnect when it was being written to or had a pending write operation not properly terminated.

Always, use the safe drive removal feature before disconnecting an external as this flushes or completes any pending write operation that might exist because of cached data.

 

[corkyg]

Capt. WD reported months ago that Pre-packaged WD externals now have built in encryption that cannot be turned off. That makes it nigh impossible to read the disks outside of the case or if the pre-packaged encryption system fails. That could be what you are running in to.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2995...k-drives-have-flaws-that-can-expose-data.html

 

[Muse]

Well, after about 20 hours, a [boot drive]:\>chkdsk /r E: finally completed and the drive is no longer seen as RAW. Chkdsk found myriad errors of various kinds. I saved its output to a text file. I wasn't finding any online references to chkdsk use with HDs reported as RAW so I am somewhat surprised. However, my experiments with Testdisk each failed to do anything with the drive, so I turned to chkdsk in a WTH scenario.

The last line of the chkdsk output was:

An unspecified error occurred (6e74667363686b2e 1475)

So, I did not expect that the problem had been fixed, but looking in Explorer, there it was, with it's old name, all my folders, etc., around 1/2 of its 2TB capacity in use.