I think I lost a harddrive...anyone ever had this situation...

[lordhutt]

I have a couple of 320 gig WD SATA drives.

I can't access one of them anymore. If I try to bring it up in Win. Exp. I get a popup...

F:\is not accessible
the file or directory
is corrupted and unreadable

This drive is less then a year old and always worked fine.

It all started when I came home from work...the pc was on but it was locked up.
I tried to reboot in various ways and could not get the pc to start. I completely shut it down and came back a little later and got it started (I have no idea what I did different).
The drive was in windows explorer with the folder directory visible....but when I clicked on any folder it gave me an error. I rebooted and this time the drive was not even in WE.

I removed the drive and played around to make sure all my other drives were intact. I put it back in and it recognizes it but get nothing but that error if I click on it. One thing different is that the name I gave the drive is not even there anymore...it is reading as the default 'local drive'.

Anyone have any suggestions or is this drive lost??? I don't know what else to try....I was going to try it in another pc but didn't get that far yet. I don't think that will make a difference thought as I have 4 other HDD's that are working.

[Ghostmaker]

You might want to get a copy of spinrite, It might be able to fix the drive so you can back it up before it crashes.

[MJA]

WD Diagnostic Utilities

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n

[guns1inger]

I recently had to recover from a drive that windows could see, but saw as an unallocated disc. The master file table had been trashed. I used : http://www.file-recovery.net/ and was able to get all the files back. Unfortunately I was unable to format the drive afterwards, so the damage to the drive was pretty serious. Note : The free version works from a bootable dos disc, and is included on a number of linux bootable based repair tools. It can read NTFS formatted drives, however it can only write to Fat32/Fat16 drives

[saggitarius]

I was able to restore a whole bunch of files from some drives that crashed on me with a program called Stellar Pheonix. This is NOT a freeware tool, I think it costs about 100 US, but you can get a free trial of it to see if it even CAN recover your files. It does work on SATA drives, I know this because it was a SATA drive that was giving me the problem.

[offline]

Some good suggestions above. I'm a fan of Spinrite since the old "mfm rll" days. R-Studio is possibly one to look at (in your case) depending how important your data is. It might be something simple like a partly thrashed descriptor , or it might be more serious. In that case a specialist can mirror what is readable and do the recovery on a new drive (not cheap.)

[kimco52]

Doesn't the drive need to be recognized by the operating system and/or the BIOS before any of those programs will work? If the computer doesn't see or recognize it, how can it get data off of it?

[MJA]

I think you ganna need a floppy drive,or a USB/firewire box

[ntscuser]

It happened to me recently. Go to Control Panel--->Performance and Maintenance--->Administrative Tools--->Computer Management--->Disk Management, right-click on the problem drive and rename it with the drive letter of your choice.

[KBeee]

You could also try right-clicking on ther drive, select properties/tools/error checking, and tick the "automatically fix file system errors"

[Soopafresh]

If your bios doesn't recognize it any longer, then it is going to be...tough, probably fruitless. Check your other WD drives (the identical ones). Make sure the serial numbers aren't close to each other. You could have a bad batch.

If you absolutely must try to get the data off, you'll probably need to unscrew the logic board from the bottom of the drive and replace it with an identical model.

[KBeee]

Just a thought, your Western Digital HDD's aren't RE's are they?

[lordhutt]

Ok, you guys are certainly giving me many options to try here. I will try these out and see if I have any luck. I will post my results.

@KBeee
What are RE's?

@Soopafresh
The drive is recognized in the bios.

[nic2k4]

Doesn't the drive need to be recognized by the operating system and/or the BIOS before any of those programs will work? If the computer doesn't see or recognize it, how can it get data off of it?

No, WD's Datalifeguard will find the drive if it's on the cable and powered. lordhutt, do as MJA suggested first, you'll find out if your drive is toast or not, then you can try recovering data. Don't repair the drive before doing recovery. If your drive is toast, the software probably won't see it, but it will ask you to print an RMA.

guns1inger, using manufacturer's tools like Datalifeguard or Spinrite, you can low level format your drive and bring it back to life.

[Soopafresh]

Even if you see files during repair, it doesn't mean that they are actually good, unfortunately. I like Spinrite, too bad it is slower than molasses.

[guns1inger]

guns1inger, using manufacturer's tools like Datalifeguard or Spinrite, you can low level format your drive and bring it back to life.

Sometimes.

[bevills1]

Is the drive a single partition, or is it partitioned into multiple drives? I've had similar problems with WD IDE drives, but luckily I had all data backed up and Ghost image of boot drive. Initially I thought it to be a defective drive and did RMA to WD for replacement, but the problem recently began to recur. In another post at https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=1679115#1679115 a reply received indicates it might be bad IDE controller. If mine is bad IDE controller, then it's possible yours might be bad SATA controller.

[sitlet]

try a program calleg GetDataBack. i think its all one word, might be separate words. but i had a drive like yours that one day stopped being recognized. turns out the mft got messed up, so all the data was still there, just not being recognized by windows. that program will let you get all the data off, then you can reformat in windows and it should work. it is not a free program, but the trial will let you look at the data to make sure its still there. then you can buy the program, it wasnt too much, and get the data off. that thing saved a LOT of important data on my drive

[lordhutt]

I am think I am in the clear now...I was worried for a second though...
The drive passed both of the WD diagnostic tests so I figured the drive was physically ok.
However, I still could not get it to do anything. I had tried the Stellar Pheonix but I think it just locked up. I decided to try a quick format and it ran...I was able to now access the drive and do whatever with it. I ran a restoration program I already had and it showed nothing. I thought I may have made a mistake and came here to whine about it and saw sitlets recommendation for GetDataBack. Well, after running for 8 hours is showed me a complete directory for everything that was on my hard drive. I don't have time to mess with it right away but I ran a couple of the files and they worked fine. Now it should just be a simple matter of copying the files that I need.

Thanks everyone for the help.

[bevills1]

Recheck https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=1679617#1679617
to see a link to a free program that's supposed to help recover the drive with data as well as another possible cause I found for my situation.

[handyguy]

I put my HD in another computer & it worked right. Might be the cable sometimes.

[lordhutt]

Files recovered and copied to another drive. ....and backed up to dvds!
My only concern now is weather to trust this drive again...I guess since everything is backed up it should not be a major concern.

Thanks again guys.

[bevills1]

Do you remember what processes were running or what may have caused the initial crash? For my similar problem it happened 3 or 4 times in 1 week and always occurred while either ripping a DVD or burning a DVD which are memory and CPU intensive processes. I suggest trying to repeat the cause if known or do some intensive processes such as DVD ripping or burning to try to cause the catastrophy to repeat. That's how I finally believe I fixed my problem although I'd still have been ignorant of the cause if I hadn't luckily been watching when the last crash occurred.

[cd090580]

I've had this one time. Just try the scandisk from windows. Sometimes it do miracles. Just check correct FileSystem error.


It the error in only MFT related the problem can be fixed easily since there are a backup copy of the MFT.

If Scandisk recover your drive, backup all you datas and reformat the drive (full format) to make sure a new MFT is written.


You can use GetDataBack for NTFS (not free) or the excellent PC Inspector File Recovery (totally free) to get your files back.

[lordhutt]

bevills1
I was doing nothing out of the ordinary so I really don't know what may have caused...actually one thing I might have been doing...I have decided to make a lossless backup of my audio collection so I have been ripping a bunch of cd's to the drive that failed as well as backing up a lot of files so I was doing a great deal of copying and pasting from this drive as well. But why these things would cause this to happen is beyond me.

cd90580
I just did a quick format on it before I recovered the data with GetDataBack. After that I used WD tools to write all zeros to the drive (don't know if this served any real purpose but I did it anyway)...then I had to use WD tools to get Windows to recognize the drive again.