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Please Help With Hosed Up External HDD!!

S

Scroatdog

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 17, 2003
Messages
1,432
Ok. I picked up a 160 gig WD dirve from Fry's the other day. After rebates, 60 bucks, couldn't resist.

Anyhow, formatted in NTFS, computer recognized it, and made sure it was optimized for quick removal. I've got the drive in an external firewire enclosure, as I have no more room in my case for it.

I have saved about 51 gigs of 'backup' images of my DVD's on there. Now when I right click or try to access the drive is says "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable".

Am I hosed???? Is there anything I can do to get those files back??? Help! This is so frustrating, I want to lob the enslosure out the window!!!!

Thanks
 
Well I am not sure what exactly is wrong, but I would try and contact Western Digital. Either post on thier forums or phone support when you can do that.
Other than that, can you read anything on the disk at all? If not, sounds like the MBR got messed up somehow and I am not sure how to fix that. Sorry, with I could be of more assistance.
 
the EXACT same thing happened to me about 2 weeks ago
brand new HD
using a firewire enclosure
the $volume$ folder got corupted
as well as the MBR
this was due to the enclosure NOT THE HD
2 days later the encloser failed completely
one of the caps exploded and took out the electronics
didn't hurt the HD thank god(250gb maxtor)

since you had only just started putting files onto the HD
you can probobly recover everything still
go get ahold of a copy of ontrack easy recovery profesional
(kazaa and bittorrent work nice)
and run it using the raw recovery mode
when i did it i was able to recover about 95% of everything i cared about
before trying to recover move the HD into your case
dont try using the external for the recovery

there are some NTFS recovery tools built into the windows
recovery console
but i dont know them
i would do some research on the M$ website on NTFS
there are mostlikly some instructions on it
good luck
 
tiebird321 said:
the EXACT same thing happened to me about 2 weeks ago
brand new HD
using a firewire enclosure
the $volume$ folder got corupted
as well as the MBR
this was due to the enclosure NOT THE HD
2 days later the encloser failed completely
one of the caps exploded and took out the electronics
didn't hurt the HD thank god(250gb maxtor)

since you had only just started putting files onto the HD
you can probobly recover everything still
go get ahold of a copy of ontrack easy recovery profesional
(kazaa and bittorrent work nice)
and run it using the raw recovery mode
when i did it i was able to recover about 95% of everything i cared about
before trying to recover move the HD into your case
dont try using the external for the recovery

there are some NTFS recovery tools built into the windows
recovery console
but i dont know them
i would do some research on the M$ website on NTFS
there are mostlikly some instructions on it
good luck
Click to expand...

Thank you SO much for your reply. That was about the best info I've received so far from every site I posted on. The current enclosure I am using is made by BYTEC. It's a 5.25 with a fan. Got it at Newegg. Looks like RMA city for me. I'll look for that data recovery you speak of. But before jumping on "other" sites to find it, is there any good freeware utility that would work just the same???
 
there are very few free recovery windows tools
there are some that you can get for under $40 though that do a good job

http://www.quetek.com
make a very good one
it can also do the raw recovery
its $39.99
download the demo version and let do a scan of the HD
(will take about 4-6hours)
it will list everything it could possibly recover
be aware though
your not going to get file names back
its only going to list file0001.iso etc
also its only going to be able to recover the first fragement of the file if its fragemented at all
how it works is it scans the HD byte by byte looking for the header of the file (for instance every gif starts with GF or something like that)
so it finds them and keeps scaning until it finds the next header
or it finds the file end point
(this is why you want to defragement often)

there are some NTFS tools built into the windows recovery console
i have been told by a fellow sysadmin that they might beable to reconstruct the $volume$ folder on the drive
and thus you would have everything including the filenames and all
do some research on the M$ website and google on it as well
you might have some luck
 
Thanks again for the reply. I'll try to mess around more when I get home from work.

I'm thinking maybe the system is getting screwed up because my "Drive 0" is a RAID-0 array on the Serial ATA, and only have one burner on the PATA connections. The disk was shown properly in Windows Disk Management, as "Disk 2". I formatted it using NTFS, but didn't make any partitions. Maybe I should have partitioned it??? I really didn't think it mattered. I just wanted the whole 160 gigs as one big backup storage medium.

I'll be pissed if it's the BYTECC enclosure that's jacked up. I've used it a total of three days now....
 
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