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Question of the Day: At what point do you sell your car?
Crashing Hard Drives
- Thread starter Aharon
- Start date
Fact that one partition is still accessible, it gives clear indication that data corruption during transfer occours. It could be:
1. Faulty PC, but it would corrupt a boot drive too.
2. Faulty USB bridge giving intermittent errors. -this-
3. Faulty hard drive writing errors, but it happens the same with both drives and SMART (while incomplete picture) doesn't show any problems.
So I agree with the other post that your docking station is faulty, don't use it anymore.
How to recover data? I don't expect bad sectors, but to avoid mistakes and lose data forever, make sector copy of the hard drive (or select in this case faulty partition as an object) and then try to recover from the copy. Destignation can be a physical drive or an image file. If you use free tools, don't use special (proprietrary) options like compressed image, just pure sector-by-setor copy. Some utilities build virtual image of the partition details in memory, it will not change anything on the drive, so you don't need to image the drive if drive is healthly.
Unfortunately Hiren's boot CD doesn't include specialised data recovery software. You can try DMDE. In free edition you can copy file-by-file, but not entire directories.
Edit: I never used it on the drives >2TB
Edit 2: Don't trash docking station if you can use eSATA interface. USB bridge is not used in such case and protocol conversion doesn't occur.
1. Faulty PC, but it would corrupt a boot drive too.
2. Faulty USB bridge giving intermittent errors. -this-
3. Faulty hard drive writing errors, but it happens the same with both drives and SMART (while incomplete picture) doesn't show any problems.
So I agree with the other post that your docking station is faulty, don't use it anymore.
How to recover data? I don't expect bad sectors, but to avoid mistakes and lose data forever, make sector copy of the hard drive (or select in this case faulty partition as an object) and then try to recover from the copy. Destignation can be a physical drive or an image file. If you use free tools, don't use special (proprietrary) options like compressed image, just pure sector-by-setor copy. Some utilities build virtual image of the partition details in memory, it will not change anything on the drive, so you don't need to image the drive if drive is healthly.
Unfortunately Hiren's boot CD doesn't include specialised data recovery software. You can try DMDE. In free edition you can copy file-by-file, but not entire directories.
Edit: I never used it on the drives >2TB
Edit 2: Don't trash docking station if you can use eSATA interface. USB bridge is not used in such case and protocol conversion doesn't occur.
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FlatspinZA
Expert Member
I think TestDisk comes with Hiren's BootCD, though I didn't have much luck with that so I just manually installed TestDisk directly using an Ubuntu LiveCD. Run TestDisk as administrator in Ubuntu (if you don't run as admin, you sit for hours and wonder why nothing is being written to the external), and it will find all file systems (even if your MBR is corrupt), then choose from which file system you want to restore the data - attach external HDD & recover your data. It took me about 6 hours to recover the data from an old laptop with 250GB HDD.
Maverick Jester
The Special One
It does.
I've had nothing but trouble with Seagates over the years
So far my best drive has been Samsung and the 2 X WD's I have.
I've had nothing but trouble with Seagates over the years
So far my best drive has been Samsung and the 2 X WD's I have.
I'll agree with Samsung any day - from the mouth of a fanbooi
Grant
Honorary Master
I am so done with WD drives.
Wont go near them with a barge pole again.
Wont go near them with a barge pole again.
In that case, would it be possible to copy the data on your other drive somewhere? I assume you where using both partitions.
Actually I'm talking about your other working drive. You mentioned you had 2.
So it's dead?
Download this,
go to "File->Disk->Open Drive..."
select the drive as a PHYSICALDRIVE (no drive letters or partitions, could be tricky with multiple drives but with 2 should show up as PHYSICALDRIVE1)
enter 0x0400 for "Load" (you can set this for default)
might be a good idea to select Readonly
First sector should give some gibberish followed by a large open space to about 0x3F: (could be before) and some more gibberish. Some of it should have some readable code and it should be identical on reopening the disk.
go to "File->Disk->Open Drive..."
select the drive as a PHYSICALDRIVE (no drive letters or partitions, could be tricky with multiple drives but with 2 should show up as PHYSICALDRIVE1)
enter 0x0400 for "Load" (you can set this for default)
might be a good idea to select Readonly
First sector should give some gibberish followed by a large open space to about 0x3F: (could be before) and some more gibberish. Some of it should have some readable code and it should be identical on reopening the disk.
koeksGHT
Dealer
seems we all use it xD
See if there's anything wrong with the boot sector and if it's readable.
RyanPCMR
Expert Member
Yes, it contains recovery tools as well.
You guys are right. I was pissed of on Hiren's CD and memorised the wrong side of the story, having intermitted USB drive hanging up when using these utilities and eventually gave up.
Now (after reading FlatspinZA comment) I looked again and found that Hiren's CD (Mini XP) drivers are in conflict with USB mass storage devices which had been already initialised by BIOS. When I plug-in USB device after booting MiniXP, everything works.
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