Restoring Corrupted Partiontion on Samsuing F1 1TB

[Dr Atom Magnum]

I had my reservations about the Samsung F1 1TB drive but it was both faster and cheaper than the competing drives so I bought one and put all my files on it. Unfortunately it only took two weeks to fail catastrophically. I had a single partition on the drive which contained all my files but when I started Windows today it just showed up as "Local Disk" with no capacity:

http://i25.tinypic.com/vcxj52.jpg

Presumably all the files are still there and the partition table just needs repairing. I downloaded some demo versions of programs that are supposed to repair partitions (Active Partition Recovery 5.1, Partition Table Doctor) but from the demos you can't tell if they can successfully repair the drive and I don't want to spend $50 on an application if it turns out to be useless (especially when I've not got to buy another hard disk to replace this piece of crap Samsung).

Does anybody have any suggestions how I can restore the data?

[vidoprof]

I have the same issue and wondering the same thing. If you hear of anything please post it here.

Thanks
Ryan

[pug71]

In the time you purchased the drive and started using it did you not have any backups just in case this happened?

[vidoprof]

BTW,

I just ran the Seatools from Seagates support website. I downloaded the software for DOS, it's an ISO image. I burned it to a CD and then rebooted.

I let the image run and then selected the drive from the list and let the LONG test run and it asked if I wanted to Repair all and I did that one and BAM I can see all the data on the drive and I am now copying it all off of there. I WILL try and see if it boots up after I am done copying everything off of it (it's my laptop OS drive)

Hope that helps

Ryan

[Dr Atom Magnum]

vidoprof, thanks a lot for the suggestion I'll give Seatools a try. I don't care what happens to the drive as I'll probably bin it anyway, just as long as I can get my files off.

[skypine27]

Sorry about your Samsung bro. I also have the 1TB Spinpoint F1, and it runs faster and cooler than all my other drives (see sig).

I've had it about 4 months now, and I certainly hope the same thing does not happen to me.

Good luck getting your data back.

[Dr Atom Magnum]

I've run two restoration programs which took about 20 hours each but have got nothing back. I just noticed that the drive now shows up as being 7.87GB in size in the Windows XP Disk Manager:

http://i26.tinypic.com/rhk8x1.jpg

I don't think there's any hope for it. I'm screwed. I wish I'd seen the user reviews on New Egg before I bought it. The thing is clearly a total piece of junk.

If I could do it again I would have bought two Maxtors and used one as a backup. It's a bit late to be worrying about backups now though because I've lost everything. I may as well go and buy an 80GB disk since that's all I need now :(

[skypine27]

I'm not trying to defend the Samsung, but it is generally a good drive.

Most of the bad reviews on newegg are from people who are running a 680i chipset, and/or from people who ran the samsung utility to check for bad sectors (its not compatible with the drive and reads incorrectly).

Sharky really liked the drive:

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/article.php/3742526

and its always near the top in most benchmarks of people reviewing other drives:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914-10.html

Yeah, it does blow hard that yours failed. I've had TWO laptop drives fail, one maxtor and one segate and I don't hold a hard grudge against either company.

But again, sorry about your drive bro.

[Old Hippie]

Seriously Doc, it can happen to anybody at any time.

Just for shits and giggles, you might wanna try my all-time favorite recovery software, GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/). It's free to try!

Good Luck!

[leemik]

I had a corrupt partition once and this free tool fixed it:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk