HDD Still Visible but Data Gone

[zoobie]

Try the free MiniTool Power Data Recovery which can also see raw data. Worked for me...and welcome to the wonderful world rife with fraud of data recovery

[p_l]

I've done a FixMBR via the recovery console before for a boot drive, but can you do it for just a storage drive?

Running MiniTool Power Data Recovery now. The good news is that it sees the drive as the full 3 TB. The downside is that it tells me I have to run a full scan in Damaged Partition Recovery. Time remaining: 26 hours 19 minutes. OK...

[jollyjohn]

What error message ?

It really sounds like this HDD is fooked.

Rooted, Fragen, screwed, shagged, crapped, cagado.

[nic2k4]

I've done a FixMBR via the recovery console before for a boot drive, but can you do it for just a storage drive?

Every drive has a "MBR", so FIXMBR is applicable to any drive. FIXBOOT is the one that only works on boot drives.

[DB83]

I've done a FixMBR via the recovery console before for a boot drive, but can you do it for just a storage drive?

Every drive has a "MBR", so FIXMBR is applicable to any drive. FIXBOOT is the one that only works on boot drives.

Is that wise on a 3tb Hdd when MBR only supports Hdd's up to 2tb ?

[DB83]

duped

[Nelson37]

The long times you are seeing are not at all unusual for a 3TB drive. I would expect 2-3 days.

GetDataBack is the best I have used, cost 69.95 though.

[nic2k4]

Is that wise on a 3tb Hdd when MBR only supports Hdd's up to 2tb ?

GPT drives are supposed to have a protective MBR, you'd think FIXMBR could use that. From what I see it wouldn't even run, so no harm done. It's obvious there's a serious lack of tools to maintain very large drives that use GPT. The best tool so far seems to be GPT Fdisk, but it runs under Linux and is a work in progress (it's included with PartedMagic).

Everytime new groundbreaking drive technology comes out, the software support is always lagging behind; think of all the trouble with drives over 512 MB, 8.4 GB, 32 GB, 128 GB... With drive reliability being a crap shoot I'd hate to lose terabytes of files in one go. Might be preferable to have 2 large mirrored drives for back up or maybe spread the file over a bunch of smaller drives. I'm avoiding drives over 2 TB until they have universal support.

[Cornucopia]

Me too, and I'm setting up my home NAS/MediaServer to use mirrored drives this weekend. Once I can afford it, I'll do RAID10.

p_l, I think you've pretty much exhausted your possibilities - time to hang your head & move on. Man, I sure hope you had BACKED UP that data!

Scott

[p_l]

Actually, MiniTool Power Data Recovery did manage to recover a huge bunch of files.







Two problems, though.

1. The original folder stucture is gone and so are the file names, and they are only arranged by file types. Therefore, I'd have to sort through, in some cases, over 16,000 individual files and rename them and sort them into their proper folders.
2. Only certain files types are detected. Note the complete absence of video files. Luckily for me, all my document, music, picture and home video files were already backed up. All I'm really missing are a couple dozen TV shows and movies. These are replacable, but I'd be sorely disappointed if I hadn't backed up my irreplacable document and media files.

So the files, for the most part, still reside on the drive, though I can see that a few of the picture files are corrupted. The quest therefore remains to find a tool or method to recover more and in a more file-manageable way.

[p_l]

Running GetDataBack now.

How exactly would you run FIXMBR on a drive in a toaster?

[DB83]

78 gig from 3tb is hardly 'huge' but it is better than 0 gig.

I suppose I was lucky with ZAR. I tried the free version and encouraged by the reponse I planned to get the full one to do the actual recovery. I had a short trip planned and checking the news stand at the station I saw the self-same program - full version FREE - on a cover-mounted disk. On my return I obtained another external HDD and recovered practically 100% of the files in a few hours.

One other thing. With a failing/failed drive, using a plethoria of tools IMHO deminishes the chances of reasonable sucess in the repeated access of that drive.

I used just the one tool. So, yes, I really was lucky.

[p_l]

GetDataBack hasn't yielded much of anything useful.



Next? At this point, I'm really just continuing for the leaning experience.

[zoobie]

Knoppix

[p_l]

One other thing. With a failing/failed drive, using a plethoria of tools IMHO deminishes the chances of reasonable sucess in the repeated access of that drive.

True dat.

Knoppix

Care to elaborate? I tried a few things on Hiren's, like EASUS, but not sure what else to try.

[p_l]

Thought I'd give good ol' Spinrite a... spin.

• 2% complete
  • Time Elapsed: 18 hrs. 29 min.
  • Time Remaining: 876 hrs. 13 min.

[aedipuss]

Thought I'd give good ol' Spinrite a... spin.

• 2% complete
  • Time Elapsed: 18 hrs. 29 min.
  • Time Remaining: 876 hrs. 13 min.

lol - what a joke.

[turk690]

This particular HDD is connected via an internal SATA card - this type of thing:


Maybe I could try connecting the drive directly to the motherboard to see if the card is the problem?

I bought a similar card with PCIe interface at a Canada Computers a few months back with a view to forming a bootable RAID1 array (all of the existing SATA ports on the ancient Gigabyte mainboard GA-EX58-UD3Rv1.6 I use are duly employed). The price point was attractive (C$29. or so). The accompanying CD-ROM had sparse documentation and RAID tools that plain didn't work. Going to vantecusa website was no better. Connecting 2 WD green drives to it, after OS installation, almost every other day it claimed a 'one of the RAID1 drives either had to be re-imaged or synchronized' which took the better part of overnight. Then one day it simply said 'connect a new drive'; one of the RAID1 volumes just disappeared! Stay away from this & similar aaaaaaaargh!! vantec cards.
In the end I was forced to just consolidate the HDDs I used (some were still ancient 300GB) to fewer new big ones (like Hitachi 3TB external drives (cheaper (!) than its internal counterpart, so I bought it & took it out of its case) to fit into all of the available SATA ports on the main board (6 from chipset, 2 onboard).
The Hitachi drives may be similar to the ones the OP is having problems with. Taken out of its external case & connected directly to a main board SATA port, Windows initially described it as an unrecognized format, so I duly formatted it with NTFS to turn it into basic.

[Cornucopia]

Thought I'd give good ol' Spinrite a... spin.

• 2% complete
  • Time Elapsed: 18 hrs. 29 min.
  • Time Remaining: 876 hrs. 13 min.
  
  
  
  

lol - what a joke.

I take it from that remark you've never experienced the joy of having Spinrite resurrect a seemingly-dead drive before. It's greatly helped me through the years (~18x), including 2 weeks ago at work. Probably not good to scoff at something you don't understand. And, yes, it often DOES take that much time...

Scott

edit: However, the problems the OP is facing are probably NOT due to hardware failure (at least on the part of the drive, more likely either the MOBO/Card controller or in the partitioning & management of same), so Sprinrite would probably not be very useful.

[KTH]

By any chance is the 3TB drive in question orignally from a external enclosure? I just picked up a Toshiba 2TB Touro drive and once I removed it from the case and hooked it up as an internal drive the computer shows it as not being formatted even though it had data on it before taking it out of the external enclosure. Before removing it from the enclosure it showed up as being formatted in the NTFS format. I am wondering if Toshiba is using some kind of proprietary or encrypted NTFS format that can only be read when it passes through the enclosures controller card so if you try hooking up the drive to any other controller the drive shows up as unformatted. If your drive was indeed originally an external card try hooking it back up to the enclosures controller card to see if your data shows up again.

[p_l]

Not originally from an enclosed drive, no. And remember, it turns out it wasn't the one of my two Hitachi 3 TB drives that was connected via the card, it was the one that had been connected directly to the motherboard all along.

I just interrupted SpinRite (impatient that I am) and ran EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard.



Not only is it the method that has yielded the most found files, it actually found a bunch of video files as well. The only thing is that accessing the drive in a USB toaster only made 700 or so GB visible, but I think I might try connecting it directly to the motherboard of the secondary computer I'm trying all this on now to see if EaseUS might see the full 3 TB.

[p_l]

Hooking up the drive directly to the motherboard didn't allow EaseUS to show it saw more than 700 or so GB, but it did recover tens of thousands of files totaling about a terabyte and a half. Weird.

Problem is although the recovered files are categorized by EaseUS by type (e.g., Word document, MP3 file, MOV file, etc.), the file names are gone, so that would mean tens of thousands of files to tediously sift through, identify and rename.

Fortunately, I had redundant backups of just about everything but the very last files recently added, so I just deleted the recovered files and went ahead and reformatted the drive. At first blush, it seems to be operating normally, but of course I don't trust it anymore so I'm not going to use it as an active drive now. I've just copied over a couple of TBs of data files and will stow it away as yet another redundant backup, maybe on a secondary machine, maybe offsite.

[DB83]

Just a little actual story from me from yesterday and today.

Yesterday, my capture drive gave me some problems. Although Windoze reported I still had over 70 gig free, I could not capture more than a few seconds in Mpeg2.

Ran the 'Error-checking' tool and that reported no errors. Yeah, I could read the drive before this and should have backed up the data first (assuming that was possible) "What a mistake I a make" to quote Capt Bertorelli (Allo Allo)

When I re-booted, the drive was still there but I think from this thread you know the next bit.

Now ZAR saved me last time this happened so I put my faith in it once more.

Today, it took some 4hrs30 to check the drive (just under 400 gig) and another few hours to actually recover the files on to an external HDD. As far as I can tell, at first glance, all have been recovered and with the original file names etc.

Later I will try to refromat this partition but I thing it is fooked and I must backup the other partition before another potential disaster