External Hard Drive recovery

[trooper11]

I am using an external hard drive case and one of the hard drives i use in it appears to be failing. When I have it installe din the case, and plug in the usb cord, Windows does pick up the external case as well as the drive itself just like normal. But then when i try going into My Computer to access the drive, it is very very slow to respond. Finally My Computer will come up, but its still slow to respond to any actions i try to take. It does display the drive with correct letter I had assigned it previously.

When trying to double click the drive, it hangs and hangs until finally giving me the following error:

'H:\ is not accesible

Error performing inpage operation'



Also, I noticed that when its trying to access the drive, I will hear short click sounds, not loud, but its like the sound of a drive being accessed, its just in short bursts. The light on the external drive which is normally green during operation, flickers red for a very short moment, the same time of the short accessing sounds.

I tried other hard drive sin the case and they are still working fine, its only this dirve. Are thier any programs that I could use to test the drive or to reclaim the data on the drive? Thanks.

 

[golgotha]

It sounds like that drive is failing or has failed. You could try connecting it directly to the motherboard directly bypassing the external case. But if the drive is dead already, you'd get the same error.
I don't know how to recover data from a failed drive.

 

[homestarmy]

I would also connect it directly to the motherboard and see what happens.

Same problem? I hope you didn't have important data on there. Time for drivesavers which I believe is pretty freakin expensive!

 

[trooper11]

well i finally had a chance to put the drive into a system. Its not making any strange noises or vibrations. During booting, the bios picked up the drive just fine. Then Windows tried to run check disk but an error occured. then it booted into Windows and took a long, long time to finally startup. The drive did not appear in my computer once it did start into windows. Im running XP Pro.

Im starting to doubt that the drive is physically damamge since its not giving any of the usual signs, in fact i can feel it spinning up and running as if it was normal. What else can I try to retreive the data on it?

 

[RebateMonger]

If the disk is spinning, then it's either head damage or controller board damage. The odds of "inexpensive" recovery of data are not good. The slow booting of XP is typical when you install a second, failed, hard drive.

You should consider what the data is worth to you. If it's "priceless", you should think about sending the drive to a high-end data recovery expert. Data recovery is most easily done when there have NOT been prior attempts to "fix" things. Inept recovery attempts will just make things worse.

Ontrack is an old-line, well-known data recovery house.

If you decide you aren't willing to spend much/any money on data recovery, there's various data recovery software, there's "freezing" the drive (not likely to fix a damanged head or controller, though), there's dropping the drive on the floor (I'm not kidding). I'm sure that some others will give you links to software or procedures that they have found worthwhile.

 

[trooper11]

what i dont get is how the bios still picks up the drive correctly if the controller board was damaged

i would liek to try some other software alternatives

 

[trooper11]

ok ive tried a couple programs, one was called GetDataBack and the other was FindNTFS.

Both programs found the drive and correctly read the sectors, heads, and storage space on the drive. But when I had them go in and scan for files, all I would get are errros reading it.

 

[trooper11]

well something strange has happened.

Just for kicks I decided trying to plug the drive back into the system and booting into windows with it. Well it came up with the same check disk prompt. Only this time I cancelled it before it started. Well what should happen, windows boots up normally and suddenly the drive appears in My Computer with all the data intact as normal.

Well I dont understand why lol, but I feel pretty lucky and am backing up the drive as we speak lol. I just wonder what the cause of this is.

 

[RebateMonger]

Well, congrats on being able to back up the data.

On it's face, it appears to be head damage. But my expertise in data recovery basically stops at making lots of backups. It's easier that way.