HDD not responding

[crazyadi]

hi guys looking for some help again please :-/

in the ongoing saga of my dads pc i am faced with another drama

i downloaded all the stuff he wanted to keep onto an 2.5" HDD in a housing, it went on fine i even checked that the files were on the drive prior to wiping his system.

now ive just been to put all the files back on his shiny new windows 7 and the drive doesent resapond, it spins up fine, then spends some time, what sounds like, seeking so its quite then a like whirring sound then quite then whirring etc and the green bar at the top of the my computer page moves very slowly. eventually i get a message saying the HD needs formatting before it can be used. :-/ this is not good!!! the drive was formatted it took the files and they were there...

is there any software, free, that could allow me to examine and potentially repair the drive to rescue the software?

thanks

crazy

[consoles]

can u get an adaptor so you can fit it into the pc, i had an external sata 3 1/2 drive which did the same i just removed it from the caddy slapped it in the pc as a slave and it sprung to life.

Ive now bought one of these 3.5 2.5 Dual SATA HDD Dock Station Caddy Case USB Esata | eBay UK as they are powered and makes testing drives real easy.

mine also reads ide if you gander on ebay im sure you will find the ide/sata version.

[prezzy]

take the hard drive out of it's housing and connect direct to pc via sata (guessing is sata) should pick it up

[Pegasus]

Sounds to me like the drive has become corrupted between the data going on and trying to restore it.
It's not unusual for a drive to fail at any point in time, seems you've just been unlucky in relying on only one backup medium before you carried out the work.

[crazyadi]

im fed up of being unlucky!
ill have to get a sata cable from somewhere to try what you suggest prezzy, hopefully that will work.

cheers for your replies guys!

[DejaVu]

Have you tried different USB ports? I've found with some External drives they can fussy about which port they are plugged into.

Although his system may have 4/6/8 USB ports, some of them maybe extensions.

Try different ports (all of them if need be) the 'master' ports seem to have more power running through them and can also transfer quicker. I found this with my External portable drive - some of the USB's are not pushing enough power through the port to power the drive enough (hence why some have a split USB lead).



Also check Computer Management (Start > Right Click Computer > Manage) > Disk Management
This will a more detailed view of what is going on with the drive. RAW usually means it does need formatting (corrupt File System), but you maybe able to recover the data with a good recovery program. Also look up Spinrite!

[crazyadi]

thanks dejavu

i have got spinrite this evening just need to burn the iso as i cant get my laptop to boot with usb device :-/

tried the drive on different ports including the master ones, also tried it on my laptop still no joy and says it needs formatting.

i did also download a program called r-tools now when this initially scans the drive it lists all the relevant info.. size, file system etc and its correct iot also shows the files and folders that are on it, but when trying to extract the files it keeps coming up with crc errors and says its going to take 4days 12 hours to complete!! :-/

[Pegasus]

Try Easy Recovery Pro by Ontrack, and run it in RAW recovery mode.

[burner1]

Starting to sound like the drives on the fail mate. Getting a list of contents and folders etc. is like someone reading the index to a book: it shows what 'should' be available and where but if the platters/actuators are failing, it can't actually read the actual data off the drive where the file allocation table (index) is saying where it physically is.

[crazyadi]

thanks pegasus, i managed to work out what the problem was with the r-tools, its currently in the process of trying to recover the info, it did get to about 2000 files done with no problem but now its crc'ing on every file it tries to back up, so at best i have got a couple thousand files back.

do you think it would still be worth trying your recommendation of easy recovery pro?

think your right burner thinks its a mechanical problem :-/

thanks for the info guys

[pete252]

I know it may be a long shot but the cause of all my problems once with an ext hdd was simply a dodgy USB cable. Had very similar symptoms and was cured instantly using a different cable. Certainly worth a try before you get bogged down trying to recover all the individual files.

[crazyadi]

thanks for everyones help.

couldnt get spinrite to read anything, r-studio (tools) took 3 days to finish reading the drive but i did manage to recover everyfile on the drive in the end with only about 500 damaged and corrupted when viewing.

out of interest i formatted the drive and it took ages to do a quick format but it did do it and report the drive correctly, tried writing to it and it wouldnt take anything eben tried spinrite on a surface check/repair and it bombed out immediately!!

[Pegasus]

The drive is fucked, it's bin fodder.

[muttleymacclad]

Glad to hear you got most of the data back. Been there before myself.

Not used r-studio before, is it easy to use? is it worth buying?

[crazyadi]

The drive is fucked, it's bin fodder.

already in the bin m8! :-/

Glad to hear you got most of the data back. Been there before myself.

Not used r-studio before, is it easy to use? is it worth buying?

i had no problems with it bar the fact it took sooo long but that was due to the drive being mechanically fooked i guess. If its something you would use on a regular basis then i imagine it would be a good buy, i however used a fully functional 'evaluation' copy ;-)

The fact it recovered 95% of the files from a basically unreadable/writable HDD means it gets the thumbs up from me, it didnt hog the resources either, i was happily using my laptop over the 3 day period it was working its magic!