Hard drive inaccessible

[bakaris]

Hi,

I mounted a 750GB hard drive into an external enclosure and was using it with windows vista (64 bit). My mainboard is the asus p5k-e/wifi-ap.

The external drive wasn't working very well. Occasionally certain folders would no longer be accessible until i rebooted. On the reboot chkdsk would run, and then everything would be fine for a little while, until i began to lose access to folders again.

So I took the drive out of the enclosure, and mounted it in my case. Only now, it's not accessible at all ("G:\ is not accessible. The file or director is corrupted and unreadable.") and computer management reads it as RAW rather than NTFS. I tried running chkdsk on it, but I received the error "The disk check could not be performed because Windows cannot access the disk." and it gives no option for doing it on reboot. I tried the chkntfs /c command as well, but that didn't work.
Then I put it back into the enclosure, but now the problems are the same there as well. It's back in my case now, as that's where it want it to end up ultimately.

So I installed Active Partition Recovery. It can navigate all the folders fine, so all the data is there. I used it to rebuild the MBR thinking it had been corrupted, but it didn't resolve the problem. Active Partition Recovery has another option that allows the user to fix the boot sector, but I'm not sure if that's the problem, and the options in the subsequent screen are beyond my scope of knowledge. Here's a screen: http://img212.imageshack.us/im...2865/bootsectorsj9.jpg

I don't have space on my other drives to back up the files and reformat the drive.

Anyone have some ideas on how to resolve this? Or do I have to buy another drive to back up the data?

Many thanks in advance.

 

[RebateMonger]

The software is saying that your drive is ready for data recovery. Buy a 750 GB or 1 TB drive and do the data recovery to that drive. Then RMA the failing hard drive. Don't run the drive any more than necessary to do the recovery.

If your data has any value, don't trust it to a single instance, whether optical disk, tape, hard drive, or whatever. All of those fail eventually. Drives are cheap. Data recovery isn't.

 

[bakaris]

I had thought that the drive was fine and that there was only a problem because the eSATA controller somehow corrupted it or something along those lines, but it does seem like it's the drive now that you mention it. I'll unplug it until I get the new drive and then attempt to recover the data.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: bakaris
I had thought that the drive was fine and that there was only a problem because the eSATA controller somehow corrupted it or something along those lines, but it does seem like it's the drive now that you mention it.

Well, you can find out for sure after you recover the data. Don't do any testing before you get the data off it. Then, use the manufacturer's diagnostics software. If it finds any problems at all, RMA the drive.

In the meantime, if your data is valuable to you, get another drive and use it for backups of your data.

 

[ng12345]

I'm having the same error with my 750gb maxtor drive -- happened all of a sudden, no inciting events. I was wondering what options you used in the active partition recovery software (did you do a superscan or did the folders show up on its initial scan)? The drive is my backup drive, so if I can get a couple backups off of it I wouldn't mind.

thanks