Hard drive not found

1

1-anh

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 30, 2010
Messages
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My external hard drive that was connected via usb to my computer was transferring some files between my computer and I think the power connector must have been knocked off because files started becoming corrupt. And when I tried to turn the hard drive on again it would show up in my computer but windows said it needed to be formatted. I read that the data can be recovered by using 3rd party software. I was wondering if I needed to format the drive first before I can begin recovering the files or should I just try to recover the files prior to formatting the drive?
 
i guess it depends on the program you are using, but generally don't touch the drive until you have recovered your data.

there are loads of programs out there, i have used recover my files and it seems to work just fine. Most likely a few free ware ones that would do the same.
 
Do not format that drive, you will only make it more difficult to recover your files regardless of which method you use to do it. It doesn't sound like a power failure caused the problem, that usually doesn't cause the kind of symptoms you describe. You will want to remove the drive from inside the external enclosure and connect it directly to your computers internal SATA ports, if it's a problem with the USB enclosure then the drive might be recognized normally and allow you to copy your files off to another drive. If not, then you need some recovery software which I'm not really knowledgable about specifically. You will use this to create an image of that drive on one of the other drives on your computer, and from that image you will attempt recovery. Main thing is, don't format that drive, and don't keep running that drive in that questionable enclosure. Until you have a plan, leave that drive disconnected.

Dustin
 
Thx for the replys guys, I have downloaded recuva and active partition recovery. Hope one of them works, I just wanted to confirm that formatting it first would be a bad idea. Also does anyone know how long it usually takes to recover a drive?
 
I would first use CrystalDiskInfo to look at the SMART data to see if the drive is bad. If crystal disk info returns any status other than Good. Buy a second drive of the same or larger size and use linux ddrescue to make a bit for bit copy of the bad drive to the new drive. Then run the recovery program on the new drive.

I can help with ddrescue if you get to that point.
 
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@techbob, its formatted as FAT32.

@drescherjm, oh so I can't run the recovery program on my old drive if it has bad sectors? Also I won't be able to attempt this until I go back home in a few months. Currently on an internship far away from home and this had occurred just before I left. I powered the drive down, and I'm hoping I can still recover the data in a few months.

Sorry for asking the questions so soon, I just wanted to make sure it would be possible to recover the data.
 
1-anh said:
@drescherjm, oh so I can't run the recovery program on my old drive if it has bad sectors? Also I won't be able to attempt this until I go back home in a few months. Currently on an internship far away from home and this had occurred just before I left. I powered the drive down, and I'm hoping I can still recover the data in a few months.
Click to expand...

At work where I have 200+ drives and I have done many recoveries over the years I find the best success for dieing drives is to make a copy as soon as you can and recover off the copy.
 
1-anh said:
can I run dd_rescue on windows or is it only for linux?
Click to expand...

It looks like you can with cygwin
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

however I recommend just booting from a linux livecd. With only the new and old drives attached to your machine and nothing else. sysrescuecd is a good choice since it does not boot into a GUI by default (and you do not want a GUI for this anyways).

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

BTW, I am actually using this right now to recover a bad 1TB Seagate drive to a 1TB WDC drive. After a few hours its about 67% complete..
 
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