[cloudkeeper3]

I had a spare 80gb hard drive which I placed in a case and formatted. Loaded a ton of pics/programs to it. Everything was going great till today when I plugged it in, it was no longer recognized by my laptop. Please tell me there is something I can do to access this information. A bunch of desktops of different operating systems all tell me this drive needs to be formatted, but I'd rather not, knowing I'd lose all information that may be there. Again, I need to gain access to this hard drive and any information it has on it. Is there any possible way to do so? Or is all hope lost?

In my device manager there is a yellow (!) on symbol for the mass storage device....

Edited by cloudkeeper3, 07 February 2009 - 05:18 PM.

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Can you try directly connecting the disk to a system? It could be that the case is the problem, rather than the disk itself.

[Kemasa]

Can you try directly connecting the disk to a system? It could be that the case is the problem, rather than the disk itself.

[cloudkeeper3]

I have a case but it does not have an operating system or monitor...that's why I opted for the enclosure. I know someone who may have an open space for the drive but they are using vista, while I'm using XP. Would this be a problem?

[Kemasa]

I don't think that it would be a problem to connect it to a system with Vista, but I don't have enough experience with Vista to know 100% that there would be no problems.

[cloudkeeper3]

As I understand this to be my first solution. Are there any other solutions? If the drive doesn't work in another case, is it possible the data is still on there and a recovery company could retrieve the data for me?

[Broni]

When you connect the drive, is it listed in Disk Management (Start>Run, diskmgmt.msc)?
If so, is it listed as RAW?

[cloudkeeper3]

I'm getting bad feelings as I'm researching other sites. Thinking all data has been lost. I have a few screen shots, just having trouble uploading them

Edited by cloudkeeper3, 08 February 2009 - 07:13 AM.

[cloudkeeper3]

I have uploaded a jpg of my disk manager...I have approx. 7 gigs with a healthy but unknown partition. This 7 gigs has no drive name to it. Does any of this help anyone with my problem?

Attached Thumbnails

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Edited by cloudkeeper3, 08 February 2009 - 09:05 AM.

[Broni]

Check, if any of these free recovery tools will see the drive: http://www.raymond.c...overy-software/
Start with Recuva.

[123Runner]

Try right clicking the partition and see if it will allow you to assign a drive letter.

[BrooklineTom]

I'll try and jump on this thread since nobody seems to be responding to the similar thread I started before this one.

I tried several of the recovery tools suggested by Broni -- "Pandora Recovery", "PC Inspector File Recovery", and "Recuva". All failed in similar ways -- the tools can't seem to read the drive (an external NTFS volume). I get lots of start-bar complaints (Delayed Write Error, etc) while trying to run the recovery tools. When I attempt to run chkdsk, it stalls 1% of the way into phase 2.

The disk is spinning fine, and it loads well enough to get a drive letter and be visible. Any attempt to access generates various "Delayed Write" and read errors.

1. Does anybody know of a way to extract at least some (maybe even most!) of the 400+GB of files stored on the volume?

2. Does anybody know if the disk is dead or (I suspect more likely) badly in need of re-formatting?

3. Is there any chance that this problem is specific to the 1394 port? Is it worth trying to get at the data through the (slower) USB2.0 interface?

4. Is it worth trying to disassemble the case and hope for a way to directly mount the disk inside one of my PCs?

Thx,
Tom

[cloudkeeper3]

An update after a day of playing, I'm about to try to use Recuva. but in the mean time I got an estimate from drivesavers.com and they want a min. of $500 unless they can't recover then its $200. Got to be a cheaper way. Also when I click on 7gb partition I can't do anything with it let alone rename it to a drive name.

Edited by cloudkeeper3, 11 February 2009 - 06:43 AM.

[cloudkeeper3]

Ok, so after installing recuva. Within seconds of running it says data error(cyclic redundancy check)

[BrooklineTom]

The reason that we use a tool like "Recuva" in the first place is because the drive is malfunctioning. Knowing that the malfunction is a failed CRC is informative, but the real question is how to get the information off of the drive. Yes, some of the blocks may have gone bad. Yes, if EVERY block is bad, then the drive may be truly dead and the data irrecoverable. With MOST such errors, though, only a few blocks/sectors have failed. MOST times, the drive stops working because the bad blocks happen in a critical header area. The opportunity, if there is one at all, is for a piece of code to somehow read the majority of blocks on the disk that work fine and reassemble the files and file-system, leaving holes where data errors block data access. That's what I envision (perhaps naively) when I think of a "data recovery" tool.

My own experience with recuva, and the other tools, was that they did little more than what I can already do with "chkdsk /f", albeit with beautiful screens and helpful icons. I'm hoping that some of the more expert participants of this forum will offer some insight beyond these basics.

Thx,
Tom

[Broni]

Try freezer trick: http://geeksaresexy....cover-data.html