Corrupted Drives - in External Enclosure

[cieje]

So, I thought that a 120gb seagate drive that I have failed... despite it being replaced by seagate for a previous faulty model, but now I'm thinking it's something else.

I use that drive, and a few others externally with this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835150747

It's a neat little device; allows me to use firewire and usb2.0 when needed on different systems etc. I also have a 160gb WD that I swap in and out of the device often - and a couple smaller drives sometimes (I have large storage needs) But the seagate became unresponsive - the ntfs partition information became corrupted or something like that; luckily I was able to recover/extract most if not all the information with OnTrack Easy Recovery. And the drive seems just dandy now... passes all tests etc.

However, now the 160gb WD drive all of a sudden has a problem with it's partition information. Maybe it's because it's a ntfs dynamic volume I don't know... but it's corrupted :-( And the ontrack stuff doesn't want to do a regular recovery on it, which means I'll either lose everything or do a raw recovery which is tehsux (doesn't retain directory structure etc)

Is it too much of a coincidence that it happened to 2 drives? or is it simply something's wrong with this external device? :-(

[_Korruption_]

Shitty controllers in the enclosure, you've seen first-hand what they can do. There are only two controller manufacturers I will trust: Cypress for USB, and Oxford for Firewire. Anything else puts you at risk of the entire drive being corrupted. My enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817106095) has controllers from both brands.

A good read on enclosures, they're not all made the same: http://www.fatwallet.com/t/28/496281/

[serbiaNem]

Fear not my friend, your data is still there. That enclosure uses a prolific chipset which is known to cause data corruption. I've had two seagates corrupt under the prolific chipset before I realized where the problem was. Let me guess, you see the partition as 0GB of 0GB and corrupt.

Do yourself a favor, either use the USB on the enclosure, or throw it away and buy an oxford chipset enclosure. Connect the drive to your pc through the internals and use a program called GetDataBack for NTFS to retrieve your lost data (it's all still there). Cheers.

*Love how korruption answered first :)

[drizzt81]

Shitty controllers in the enclosure, you've seen first-hand what they can do. There are only two controller manufacturers I will trust: Cypress for USB, and Oxford for Firewire.

agreed!