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oh no!

D

doanster

Senior member
Help!
I have a Maxtor 250 GB hard drive housed in an external case. I have been using it for about a month now - I transferred all my data to it.

Problem is, all of a sudden, Windows says I can't access the drive. It states that the disk is corrupted. I have a large amount of personal data on the drive that I need; is there I way to fix this? or at least recover most of the data?

Thanks
 
First thing to do is run a SCANDISK on the external drive and configure Scandisk to "Fix errors" and "Scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors". Hopefully they're soft errors that can be repaired.

If that fails, try downloading Maxtor's HDD diagnostic from their web site and run the full (Advanced) diagnostic. This will take an hour or more. The diagnostic will either pass the drive, or fail it. If it fails it it may offer to repair the drive, and you might get lucky and recover the data.

Failing that, I've had very good luck with a couple of disk recovery apps: Disk Commander and iRecover.

Hope this helps...
 
If your drive is an IDE drive that you mounted in the external case, the problem may just be a bad connector on the enclosure or a cable, either from the IDE drive to the enclosure's external connector or from the connector to your machine. To test this, remove the drive from the case and connect it directly to your motherboard to see if Windows will recognize it as an IDE drive.

Get the latest version of Maxtor's disk testing utility for your drive from their site and run the diagnostics. If your system can still read the drive, you may be able to transfer your critical files to another drive.

Both of these have happened to me. I had a connector on a mobile rack go bad, and, on a separate occasion, the "Smart Drive" function on one on one of my Maxtor 80 GB drives suddenly gave me huge failure warning. I just stopped and Ghosted the contents of the drive to another, new drive, and all was well (except the dying drive, of course).
 
i'm assuming the flying penguin means that the diagnostics may be determine that there is information that can be salvaged and may then ask for your permission to recover corrupted files.

a good program for data recovery is runtime's getdataback (for FAT or NTFS, depending on whatever filesystem you're using).
 
Hmm... so it seems that my data still stands a chance of surviving w/o getting it recovered professionally.

So of the programs available are actually freely available on the web?

Thanks for the help ppl!
 
I'd still be looking at the connections, first. If you can connect the raw drive to an IDE channel, you may not need any recovery, at all.
 
doanster, find a copy of SpinRite (website here, but not for download) http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm you may find it on P2P, but pay for it of you have to and if it works. it will fix any drive every time. don't run scandisk on it... you could lose everything. PM me if you want, I'll help you out
 
no....
spinrite did not work like it promised!

i m gonna do a low level reformat i guess... this will make windows recognize the drive and hopefully i can find some software that will work in windows that recovers data from reformatted drives...

any suggestions on such software?
 
Originally posted by: doanster
no....
spinrite did not work like it promised!

i m gonna do a low level reformat i guess... this will make windows recognize the drive and hopefully i can find some software that will work in windows that recovers data from reformatted drives...

any suggestions on such software?
Click to expand...

getdataback as mentioned by Tami.

I just used it tonight to recover a corrupted disk and a cf card that was previosly deleted.
it is kinda cumbersome and makes its own directory and files from it recovers and you have to search for your recovered files and copy them to a reliable hdd. saved me a lot of grief.

 
hmm... i lookd at getdataback... does it only run in a windows environment? i m not sure if it wuld work cuz windows wont even recognize the drive...
 
Stop.

Download a LiveCD like Knoppix and give it a chance to at least look at the drive. You might find there is something about it Windows doesn't like, but that Knoppix will quite happily read. This depends on whether the error is physical or logical of course.
 
Linux to the rescue! 😀

I do have Knoppix on a CD... I'll give it a shot I guess. Do u know if it comes with any disc utilities?


 
Originally posted by: lansalot
Just see if you can mount the volume's, don't assume you have to bother with a full-on rescue.
Click to expand...

Hmm... can you give some more info? I am not sure what u r talking about...
thanks!

 
Hmm... just one more question:
whats the diff b/w low and high level formatting?
if I wanna hav a chance to recover my data after reformatting, which is the way to go?

thanks all for the replies!!!
 
low level writes the entire drive with 0's and if you get the correct low level format from your manufacturer, sometimes it writes all the backup stuff over again too. I used it when my RAID setup corrupted my backup stuff that tells the drive how to operate. It really shouldnt be necessary in your case.
 
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