USB hard disk problem

Closed
albert - Dec 8, 2008 at 11:10 PM
 naveenmittal - Mar 5, 2009 at 03:40 AM
Hello,
I am facing a hard disk drive reading problem since last one month and not able to resolve it.

The thing is I purchased external USB hard disk (seagate 40 gb) 2 years back.And uptil now its working perfectly fine. But suddenly one day I am not able to read my data. The problem goes like that, I have partitioned my external hard disk in two drives and named them HDD and BACKUP. But now whenever I connect my hard disk to the system. It shows me BACKUP drive with name and HDD without any name. When I open BACKUP it shows me all the previous files and folders, but if I open any of the file it says file doesnot exit. And if I open another drive without a name it doesnot show me anything. And I desperately need the data because I have lot of important things there. So please if somebody knows how to deal with this thing, I'll be very greatful.
Thanks.
Albert
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7 responses

TheParoxysm Posts 169 Registration date Sunday December 7, 2008 Status Member Last seen March 25, 2011 74
Dec 9, 2008 at 12:51 AM
Sounds like data corruption to me.
Could be that it was reading/writing to it when you unplugged it at some point.

You can still recover the data with a data recovery program, and you might even be able to get it to work, but based on what you've told me I don't have enough to come up with an accurate guess as to the problem's source.
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albertspade Posts 3 Registration date Monday December 8, 2008 Status Member Last seen December 10, 2008
Dec 9, 2008 at 03:59 AM
Thanx for your kind and quick reply TheParoxysm. Will you please tell which data recovery program can be used in this regard. I have even tried to open my hard disk from linux machine but there also its not working. One more thing I want to tell you is my hard disk has not been shown in computer management --> disk management option as well.
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sarbel.vilo Posts 233 Registration date Tuesday November 18, 2008 Status Member Last seen August 1, 2010 31
Dec 9, 2008 at 04:26 AM
Can be a virus as well... if you can do a complete scan of this drive because it can be infected
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TheParoxysm Posts 169 Registration date Sunday December 7, 2008 Status Member Last seen March 25, 2011 74
Dec 9, 2008 at 11:28 AM
You can't scan a corrupted volume. There are no recognizable files to scan.
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albertspade Posts 3 Registration date Monday December 8, 2008 Status Member Last seen December 10, 2008
Dec 9, 2008 at 04:57 AM
I tried to scan it with kaspersky antivirus. But then it says no files to scan. I can just see the folders and files. If I see their properties, its size is 0 bytes.
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TheParoxysm Posts 169 Registration date Sunday December 7, 2008 Status Member Last seen March 25, 2011 74
Dec 9, 2008 at 11:32 AM
Turn your computer off, then unplug the USB cable and then the power to the drive. Restart you computer, plug the power into the hard drive, wait 10 seconds and then plug the USB into the computer. This clears the hard drive buffer. See if the drive shows up in disk management. Before formatting, turn off your antivirus.

Now this should allow it to appear under your disk management.

As for file recovery software...

https://www.ntfsundelete.com/

Good Luck!
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albertspade Posts 3 Registration date Monday December 8, 2008 Status Member Last seen December 10, 2008
Dec 10, 2008 at 09:50 PM
Hi TheParoxysm,
Thanks for your suggestion.
I tried as you said but still the same problem.
I can see the files but cant access them, like I see the file named abc.txt in my drive but when I double click it to open it says :
Cannot open the k:\abc.txt file.
Make sure a disk is in he drive you specified.
And when I see it in my computer it shows :
Hard Disk Drives Total Size Free Space
-------------------------
-------------------------
Backup(k:) Local Disk 19.5GB 1.16GB
Local Disk(L:) Local Disk

And in computer management-->Disk management it doesnt show anything at all.
One more thing I want to add is my filesystem type is fat32.
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TheParoxysm Posts 169 Registration date Sunday December 7, 2008 Status Member Last seen March 25, 2011 74
Dec 11, 2008 at 02:56 AM
The Drive is corrupt then my friend. I'm sorry, you MAY still be able to use it if you format it, and then there's still a possibility of recovering files, BUT as it is now it's corrupt.
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Hi TheParoxysm,

I am also facing the same problem as reported above.

On top of this, everytime I plug my USB, i get a very weird kind of noise.

Can I recover any data from the hard-disk without having to pay an obscene amount of money to a data recovery agent?

Thanks,
Naveen
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