Why is my hard drive unreadable?

[Connoisseur]

Hey I was trying ot access my secondary HD (Maxtor 120gig) just now and it says "The file or directory is corrupt and unreadable". What gives? I was able to access this drive fine just yesterday. It still spins up like normal, there's no clicking, no whining and just to make sure, I ran the Maxtor Powermax utility on full scan and it says the drive is perfectly fine. I thought that maybe the Promise ATA card that the drive was attached to had gone bad so I switched the drive over to my mobo ide channel and still the same thing. This is on a fresh install of XP Pro with SP2 and I did a scan and no viruses. Can someone help me figure this out and help me recover my files from that HD??? My specs are in my signature. The only programs I have installed in the background are: VNC server, MBM, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, Logitech iTouch and Daemon tools. Like I said, I was able to access the hd fine just yesterday. The only thing I could have possibly done was restart my system. I have another maxtor 120gig hd running as primary slave and it seems to have absolutely no problem. HELP!!!

::EDIT:: I just remembered that I DID undervolt my mobile barton 2200+ (1.7ghz) from 1.35v to 1.3v and that was about when the hard drive became unreadable. This should have absolutely no bearing on the status of my HD, and even when I changed back to default voltage, the HD was still unreadable... AAAACCK. I want my pr0n back !!!!

 

[Connoisseur]

HELP

 

[Connoisseur]

??

 

[ChefJoe]

If it's a promise raid card the drives attached can be real finicky about being swapped around and they certainly wouldn't be able to be read by the mainboard's ide channels.

 

[jyates]

Originally posted by: Connoisseur
Hey I was trying ot access my secondary HD (Maxtor 120gig) just now and it says "The file or directory is corrupt and unreadable". What gives? I was able to access this drive fine just yesterday. It still spins up like normal, there's no clicking, no whining and just to make sure, I ran the Maxtor Powermax utility on full scan and it says the drive is perfectly fine. I thought that maybe the Promise ATA card that the drive was attached to had gone bad so I switched the drive over to my mobo ide channel and still the same thing. This is on a fresh install of XP Pro with SP2 and I did a scan and no viruses. Can someone help me figure this out and help me recover my files from that HD??? My specs are in my signature. The only programs I have installed in the background are: VNC server, MBM, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, Logitech iTouch and Daemon tools. Like I said, I was able to access the hd fine just yesterday. The only thing I could have possibly done was restart my system. I have another maxtor 120gig hd running as primary slave and it seems to have absolutely no problem. HELP!!!

::EDIT:: I just remembered that I DID undervolt my mobile barton 2200+ (1.7ghz) from 1.35v to 1.3v and that was about when the hard drive became unreadable. This should have absolutely no bearing on the status of my HD, and even when I changed back to default voltage, the HD was still unreadable... AAAACCK. I want my pr0n back !!!!

I know that if you "starve" a computer for power like in a brown out you can lose the
partitions in the drive and the drive will be unreadable.

Try booting from a floppy and check the partition information.

If it comes up "no partitions defined" you might as well get ready to partition and
format it.

 

[Abhi]

You can use data recovery software to recover your porn...

Active File Recovery is freeware i believe...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sounds like you might have caused data-corruption by undervolting your CPU. You do know that Windows' re-writes the boot-sector of filesystems constantly, right? (To update last-access/last-written timestamps in the boot sector.)

Thus the most important sector on the entire filesystem, is the most likely to fail too, due to data-corruption or heat problems.

Chances are very good that it is recoverable, if there are no obvious mechanical or low-leve bad-sector problems.

 

[Connoisseur]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Sounds like you might have caused data-corruption by undervolting your CPU. You do know that Windows' re-writes the boot-sector of filesystems constantly, right? (To update last-access/last-written timestamps in the boot sector.)

Thus the most important sector on the entire filesystem, is the most likely to fail too, due to data-corruption or heat problems.

Chances are very good that it is recoverable, if there are no obvious mechanical or low-leve bad-sector problems.

Hey i already tried swapping the drive in another computer and it gave me the same error. i then got on the recovery console from my xp cd and did "fixboot e:" (E being the letter of the drive). It rewrote the boot sector but didn't solve anything. I also checked with adminstrative tools and it's properly detecting the hd and listed it as active. I want to try to recover the data and maybe reformat the drive. Is there any free data recovery software?

 

[Connoisseur]

Hye guys,
I was able to recover my data. A friend recommended GetBackData and it works like a charm. Thanks for all the help.