External HD Issue

[horrorshow]

Alright, I'm not too fluent in hard drive related issues so I'm really hoping you guys can help me out (like always)

So, the woman hopped on her machine earlier and went to do something on her external and instead of it being labeled
"Passport" or whatever, it changed to being called "Local Disk" etc.

Now she can no longer access the drive and when she double clicks it, it says it needs to be formatted....

Did she lose the boot sector?

Can this be remedied via some sort of disk utility?

Or are we completely f*cked and have to pay for a drive recovery etc.... (It's got a ton of family photos and other stuff she
just can't stand to lose)

Many thanks as always,
[H]orrorshow

EDIT: After running chkdsk, the error message is as follows give or take: "Correcting error in index $0 for file 19"

I doubt that helps, but I figured I'd post an update.

 

[michalrz]

I have once successfuly rectified a problem you describe by running chdsk like you have, but honestly I would not repeat that - it was unimportant data and that's why I thought whatever. It helped.

Not trying to sound like a dick - I get that the data is important, but please treat it like an egg. If you run chkdsk, do so in read only mode (omit the /f parameter I believe).

You're saying it only showed that one error? Did it say it made alterations to the MFT or whatever?

Was the partition label restored after you ran it or does it still say local disk? Could you show us a picture of how the drive looks like in Disk Management?

The thing with external devices is that you always have to rule out what's in between - the USB wire, the USB-storage controller within the external drive. Have you tried another USB cable (if applicable) on another computer (both gen. 3 and gen. 2 USB ports?).

Are you comfortable enough with Linux or something similar to perform a bit-by-bit image of this drive and put it onto another drive? I use the Linux command dd for this.

 

[michalrz]

Also, try the following:
- check crystaldiskinfo or another SMART reader and check if it can see an actual hard drive there, with proper SMART statistics, serial number, capacity, so we can rule out the USB bridge.
- check event viewer - see if there were controller or filesystem errors recorder when you attempted to access the drive and ran chkdsk

If SMART shows an actual drive with non-failing statistics, the capacity is correct and there were no controller/FS events in device manager, you can simply run the tool testdisk to recover whatever files there were on there. Mind you, it will operate properly without a partition table, but will lose the filenames, directory structure and possibly recover particular files multiple times with varying degrees of corruption.