Warning: External drives and Hibernate

Tomson

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 19, 2007
Messages
127
This is warning to people.

I've had a 750gb wd USB2 external drive for some time at home, I recently bought a 1tb wd USB2 drive to accompany it that I will use at work

Basically what happen first. I shutdown my laptop using hibernate with drive USB drive A (750gb old drive) attached at home.

I then went to the office booted up the laptop with USB drive B (1tb new drive) attached to the same port, the pc started and went into windows a normal but in explorer it was showing details of Usb drive A. i.e the same directories, then about one minute later the computer gave me a message saying 'would you like to format the drive', strange, I already had. I checked in disk management and file system was reported as RAW!

Only about 5 gb on the new drive so I wasn't bothered to recover the stuff, so I formatted it with ntfs and thought it it goes wrong again i'm sending it back.

When I went home I shutdown using hibernate with the drive B attached, came home, plugged in drive A (my 750gb drive, 95% full) and noticed the same thing happening, in windows it showed details of Usb drive B (the one I used at work), gah!! I quickly rebooted the pc, and got back into windows and all looked ok, I then tried navigated the drive and got this message 'location not found' "Corrupt or unreadable".

I now realized what might be the problem, so I ran chkdsk rebooted and....... 100% free space, chkdsk removed everything on the drive!! 698 of 698 gb free, but all the directories still visable. Can I get this stuff back, a few posts online I've seen say the data is still there on the drive but just not properly inside a table.

Can you believe this though? surely this is a massive bug in windows if this is the case? I think what happened was windows 'thought' it had the old drive plugged in and when windows tries to access it it just think that the data is corrupt. perhaps a mft error that chkdsk royally screwed up.

edit - I'm running GetDataBack.For.NTFS as it got the best reviews %3 in so far and it's found 2700 files which sounds right as this drive had 100,000's on it, fingers crossed I can get the data back, or at least a good proportion of it, only 15 hours to go :/
 
Wow that sucks amazingly bad. On one hand it’s easy to see why windows is getting confused as swapping components around while the computer is in hibernate has always been iffy, but then again the fact that you’re using USB drives, it just seems to me that this would be a common enough occurrence that there should be some sort of safe guard in place to protect against that.

I would have expected that immediately after resuming from hibernate that it would have detected the hardware change and set up the new device. Perhaps it’s because you’re using the same brand devices on the same port? Do you have caching enabled on the disks?
 
unplug the drive before you hibernate next time is all I can tell you to do.
 
I agree that Windows shouldn't screw things up like this, but can also see that you are also asking for problems.

In the future, just shut down instead of hibernating if you are going to change the hardware config while it is off. This will properly disconnect the one device, and initialse the new drive on startup.

Thanks for sharing your hard luck with the rest of us though. I frequently pull usb devices without properly removing them from the OS, and have just been lucky so far not to screw anything up.

Don
 
GetDataBack is an awesome program, I've managed to recover a 5TB RAID5 array and got 99% of my files back with no hitches whatsoever.

Sucks about what Windows did to your drive, though. That's really lame. :(
 
I have task bar shuffle installed and accidently middle mouse clicked the program (same as close) last night but nothing happened it continued running, got up this morning went to check, 8 seconds left, great, but when it completed the program just shutdown, grrr, obviously it was just waiting for the step 1 scan to complete before exiting gracefully.

Syntax Error - thats good to know, I've heard good things abouti it, though it takes a long time.

I did notice before closing it had picked up 45,000 files which sounds like about the right amount, but I shouldn't get too excited just this yet but surely that is a good sign?

So another 12 hour wait :/, fingers crossed for later (and I've closed task bar shuffle just in case).
 
I have task bar shuffle installed and accidently middle mouse clicked the program (same as close) last night but nothing happened it continued running, got up this morning went to check, 8 seconds left, great, but when it completed the program just shutdown, grrr, obviously it was just waiting for the step 1 scan to complete before exiting gracefully.

Syntax Error - thats good to know, I've heard good things abouti it, though it takes a long time.

I did notice before closing it had picked up 45,000 files which sounds like about the right amount, but I shouldn't get too excited just this yet but surely that is a good sign?

So another 12 hour wait :/, fingers crossed for later (and I've closed task bar shuffle just in case).
I find that it's more comforting if it takes a while, it just adds to the effect that GetDataBack really is scouring every sector and every recoverable byte in your drive. :)
 
All good, what a great app this is.

I'm recovering now, lost about 75gb out of about 700gb so its not all that bad given that most of the dvds I have backed up anyway. The app has kept most of the directory structures have intact so there shouldn't be too much sorting out once the recovery is completed.

Anyone who has used the freebee or 10$ apps may what to check this out if they still have a bad drive. It takes a long time to check the drive and recover but seems to do a very very thorough job. I think in the trial version it just lets you see what it can recover.
 
You probably don't have to stop using Hibernate, just wait 'till the computer has fully waked up before plugging in the new drive once you move locations... Seems like common sense but I guess I never gave it much thought (it could happen to anyone), or plug the drives into different USB ports, although whether that'll solve much is iffy. Also, were you using the same drive letter on both drives? Might wanna consider assigning different letters too, you can do that under disk mgmt and both your drives will always be recognized with a specific discrete drive letter on your own system, might solve some a lot of conflicts.

I've got different letters for all my thumb drives even, MP3 player, etc. That way there's never any confusion. I'm not sure if I fully understood the sequence of events on your post, sounds like running chkdsk without need screwed up one of the drives though... Otherwise I don't see why Windows would format or screw with a drive's structure automatically after coming up from Hibernate (even if it's looking for one drive and finding a different one; at worst it should just error out, as it did, and simply not allow you access to it 'till you unplug/reboot, sans chkdsk).
 
I tried setting permanent drive letters before, but they never seem to stick :/

I still use hibernate but now I make sure the usb drives aren't visible in explorer before connecting them.
 
Back
Top