External hard drive not responding

T

trooper11

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 19, 2004
Messages
350
I just recently got a 1TB Western Digital hard drive and have been using it with a sata to usb adapter for external storage. It was working fine for a few days, but now, the drive will not show up at all when plugged in.

when it is plugged in, windows will not respond, most system functions fail to run even though i can still use the system outside of those functions.

at first, i was still able to see the partition drive letter listed in my computers, but it listed no size for the drive, and i couldnt explore it.

i tried running a chkdsk command and it did make some repairs, but it couldnt complete part of the repair becuase it claiming there wasnt sufficient space to do so. I have moved alot of data to the drive, but i know it wasnt even half full.

ive been trying various apps to retrieve the data, but so far nothing can see the drive to do anything with it.

My latest attempt is getdataback. When the app tries to scan for drives, i get an error saying: Windows - Drive Not Ready / Exception Processing Message

Any other suggestions as to what i should try next? Any other good apps for trying to either retrieve the data or repair the drive issue? I will try to hook the drive up internally next, but i did trying hooking it up to esata, but that didnt allow access either.
 
Have you tried plugging it in to your SATA port on your mobo yet? Can you see it in your BIOS if so? If it wont let you boot your system while it's plugged into your MOBO it's most likely DEAD. You can read up on SpinRite here and see if you think it will help your situation out.

I have used GetDataBack in the past and have had great success retrieving lost data.
 
Was the drive in an enclosure/dock or anything? or just a bare drive sitting out in the open?
 
the drive wasnt in an enclosure. i have now moved the drive internally into the system and windows can see it, so ive now been trying recovery software to get my files back. i found an app called photorec that is suppose to target media files, which is what the hard drive contains.

im waiting for a second 1TB to arrive so that i can install that internally as well and then run a recovery. anyone have any other suggestions for software thats known to be good at retrieving media files?
 
not specifically for media files, but I've used the programs ShiShKaBoB listed with success.

if the drive was unprotected, it may have been exposed to ESD.
 
i dont know if any has experience with spinrite, but i was wondering something.

if i use it, it seems like what it does is restore the files to same drive. if it goes through that process, will that mean its possibly overwritten dataq that wasnt recoverable by it? would i still be able to try another app to recover files its couldnt get?
 
Spinrite attempts to recover the data by constantly rereading bad sectors of the drive.

Naturally this is very hard on the drive's mechanical parts and may stress an older or weak drive into mechanical failure.

If it can't recover all the files you could try a different recovery program.

I like GetDataBack.
 
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