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Thread: External Hard Disk

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  1. #1
    Senior Member kingkong's Avatar
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    External Hard Disk

    Hi AO,

    I have arised one problem with my old Hard Disk

    i had some good tools and mp3's with me in a External HDD of only 40GB split in 2 sections 20 / 20 GB's unfortunatelly one section of it means of 20 GB has been corrupted (dont know the reason) but i want to recover it


    Can ne one Help in Recovering that DATA plzzzzzzzzzzzz

    as those are important for me to recover..

    Thanks and regards
    KK
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  2. #2
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    Why do you say that it is corrupted? What symptoms does it show? Does it go undetected? Or the partition is said to be unknown?

    Did you run some program what you suspect would have caused a problem?
    "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

    - Albert Einstein

  3. #3
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hi KK,

    Jockey109 is right, we need a bit more information. In addition to what he has asked:

    1. What operating system?
    2. Which partition is giving the problem, the first or second?
    3. Can you "see" anything on the corrupted partition?
    4. What error messages are you getting?
    5. What filesystem are you using?
    6. Is there anything in your system logs about it?
    7. Have you tried connecting it to a different computer?
    8. Have you tried looking at it with a different operating system?

    At the worst you can try to reconstruct the drive file by file, but that would take rather a long time. I would hope that we could find an easier solution, but we need to know more

  4. #4
    Senior Member wolfman1984's Avatar
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    The Wolfman is going to assume the drive is either FAT or NTFS.

    Stick the drive into a working Windows computer as a slave *or* place the drive into a USB chassis can plug the USB into a working Windows PC

    Download GetDataBack for NTFS or FAT32 depending on your file system.

    http://www.runtime.org/

    This software works very well and has never let me down.

    If you have courage and aren't afraid of linux, you can use Knoppix to recover data.

    http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

    Hope this helps!
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  5. #5
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Wolfie~, you are being impetuous my man:

    Stick the drive into a working Windows computer as a slave *or* place the drive into a USB chassis can plug the USB into a working Windows PC
    Please re-read KK's post:

    in a External HDD of only 40GB
    So, we might assume that it is a USB device, and that it is already a slave drive? Also, as his only problem is with one partition on an external drive, he does have a working computer?

    I would really like to have a better idea of what he means by "corruption", as it might be something as simple as the MBR/Partition Table that has become slightly screwed up.

    My thinking is that there a number of possible causes that are relatively painless to fix, whilst recovering a large quantity of data file by file can be very time consuming. Also, it would require spare space equal to that which you are recovering.

    I am always cautious when it comes to data recovery, as it is very easy to make matters a whole lot worse, particularly if the problem is a physical rather than a software one.

  6. #6
    Senior Member kingkong's Avatar
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    Hi wolfam / nihil

    Sorry Guyz i had fallen sick yesterday and i could not go to the office nor i openned my comp at home so i m replying it very late!!

    ne ways starting from the first
    i have tried this hard disk in several computers at office at my home even at cafe and frds place that means i tried with vista, XP, windows professional ,

    well i m really not able to tell you how many i actually tried as off when u ask me about OS then let me farkly tell u that i m not that familair with OS's so i cannt name all of them bcoz my next question would be of Types of OS and their functions and Merit and Dmerit.

    The frist partition is giving problem which had 18 GB space fully occupied which had around 9 - 10 GB with mp3, video songs / other where some tools given by a frd which i had rarely checked had just kept as a storage.

    and yes i truly agree to the above point that corrupt was a wrong word. this two partition i can see on My Computer as external device but when i try to get into the frist partition the comp hangs up and after a while the error message is "The Hard disk is not formatted" -> "Format the Disk"

    i hope that answers the above query and i look forward to the reply of above

    any further query plz let me know about it

    Regards
    KK
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  7. #7
    Agony Aunty-Online Moira's Avatar
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    You could always try professional data recovery but it isn't cheap.
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  8. #8
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    Before you go too far, have you tried running a chkdsk on it? Bring up a command prompt (Start->Run) and type 'chkdsk [drive letter]:' where [drive letter] is the letter of the external HD. So if the letter is E, then you would type 'chkdsk E:'. Let us know how that goes.

  9. #9
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    Dear delstar,

    As far as I know, Chkdsk will try to recover and repair only that partition which is accesible by Windows. Since Windows is saying that the drive is not formatted, I think that it would not be recoverable by Windows tools.

    @KK: Did you ever attach it to a linux PC? It may happen that accidently, you may have deleted the parition (or damaged the partition table) while on a Linux PC.

    One more question: What was the file system of the partition before it got inaccessible? And how frequently did you write data on it?
    "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

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  10. #10
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hi KK,

    Your Partition Table is damaged. Please try this tool:

    http://www.pcinspector.de/download_all.htm?language=1



    Actually, there are a number of other useful tools at that site as well. You have different software for file recovery and for pictures......... a HDD cloner and so on................
    Last edited by nihil; November 21st, 2007 at 02:37 PM.

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