Can't access or retrieve data via laptop on Seagate External HDD 1TB / parameter is incorrect

JohnM_1989 · Nov 13, 2016

Hi Everyone,

Wondering if any of you guys can help me. I've been in possession of a Seagate 1TB for a few years now and never had any problems with it. As you can imagine, it has been my primary back up source ever since and contains a lot of stuff that is quite dear to me and I really don't want to lose.

Last night when I plugged it into my laptop (I only ever plug in and play when I need it and have been guilty of unsafely removing the USB plug in the past, my bad), I noticed that it wouldn't let me access the drive and whilst my laptop recognises that it is there; my external HDD comes up with a different name from the one I have assigned to it, displaying it as "Local Disk F:" almost as if it's brand new drive and has never been used before. When I try to access it, I get the error message:

"F:/ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect"

and then I get another message telling me that

"You need to format the disk in drive F: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?"

I definitely do not want to format it as you can probably imagine and seeing as I really am no whiz when it comes to this stuff, I came here instead.

I have taken some very basic steps to try to ascertain what the problem is, but I will probably need some help interpreting it when I find out. I'm currently running a chkdsk command prompt as I understand this is what you should do first, and to my relief it recognises the personal name that I assigned to my external HDD a while back.

To double that relief, I also have a smart TV with a USB port that allows me to play external media. When I plug my HDD into the TV, it has no problem whatsoever recognising any of the files or media OR playing them either...I can access everything and all files play/display perfectly, all the folders are still there exactly as I had them.

The most frustrating and yet equally panic striking thing is that I know all of the data is still there and obviously still working because I can play it on my TV, yet after trying the external HDD on 2 different computers; I am still unable to access anything via Windows and keep getting the same error messages as if it's completely died on me. I'm really hoping that isn't the case and I'll be able to salvage it somehow because I know everything I need is still in there.

I would greatly appreciate any help with this, as ideally I would like to avoid shelling out to a data recovery company and potentially leaking any confidential information that I have stored on my external HDD. IF I have to do this however and someone can allay my fears about that I would also be very grateful!

P.S. I have an Acer Aspire E1-570, running Windows 10.

Thanks in Advance,

Yours Sincerely,
Someone who has taken a lesson from this and will only be using cloud based services in future!

JohnM_1989 · Nov 13, 2016

chkdsk seems to have finished, have an endless list of "insufficient disk space to hotfix unreadable file #________" and then it has just ended.

Argh!

Solandri · Nov 13, 2016

JohnM_1989 :

If losing the drive means you would lose all that stuff, then it is not a backup. It is your only copy.

The most frustrating and yet equally panic striking thing is that I know all of the data is still there and obviously still working because I can play it on my TV,

Why are you plugging a backup drive into a TV? A backup drive should be used to make a backup, then tucked away into a drawer until the next backup. Preferably the drawer would be in a different building, like your desk at work, in case your house burns down.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a common problem with drives that have been attached to a TV. I don't do this myself, so I've only had a chance to analyze two which had failed in this manner.

■ In one, the TV had altered its partition type ID. Apparently this didn't affect the TV (most of which run Linux under the hood - Linux seems to be very forgiving when it comes to incorrect partition type IDs), but Windows was unable to deal with it and acted as if the partition didn't exist thus presenting you the "You need to format this disk" message. Setting the ID back to NTFS (0x7) fixed it.
■ In the other, the partition table had been corrupted. Fortunately drives come with two partition tables, and the secondary was uncorrupted. Copying it over the primary fixed the problem.

As best as I can tell, the problem occurs when people unplug the drive while the TV is in the middle of accessing the drive. I have no idea why this would corrupt the partition table or partition ID. I really wish they'd make external drives with a write-protect switch just to prevent problems like this. It's not like you ever want the TV to write anything to the drive, so the capability only causes grief and corruption.

chkdsk normally requires a readable partition, so I don't know how you managed to run it. Hopefully it hasn't changed anything on the drive - if it has, you may have just destroyed all your data.

First, I'd download a Linux boot CD and boot off that. See if it can autodetect, mount, and read your external drive. Since the TV could, I'm hoping another Linux distro can. If it can access your data, go ahead and copy it to another drive before attempting to fix this one.

Next, try the free version of MiniTool Partition Wizard. It'll let you see if the partition(s) is still on the drive and show you the partition ID. Windows usually formats external drives as NTFS, so if it's not NTFS that's probably the problem. Try changing it to NTFS and see if that makes the disk readable. If NTFS doesn't work, try the other usual suspects - exFAT and FAT32 being the most likely. If none of these work, set it back to what it was originally. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WRITE OR REPAIR ANYTHING during this process. Your #1 goal is to recover your data. Then you can worry about fixing the drive and cleaning it up.

https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

Repairing a corrupt partition table is trickier. I haven't done it in a while so I don't recall the exact steps. One of the partition management tools on the Ultimate Boot CD had an option to copy the secondary partition table over the primary. Be aware that this is irreversible and can result in total data loss if this wasn't the problem. I only did it after making a complete image of the original drive so I could roll back the changes if it didn't fix it.

Once you get it fixed, please buy another drive so you can make real backups.

JohnM_1989 · Nov 13, 2016

If losing the drive means you would lose all that stuff, then it is not a backup. It is your only copy.

Point taken Solandri, I have been silly; I know.

Why are you plugging a backup drive into a TV? A backup drive should be used to make a backup, then tucked away into a drawer until the next backup. Preferably the drawer would be in a different building, like your desk at work, in case your house burns down.

To be fair I never normally plug it into the TV, I only did that last night to see if it still recognised the data; which it does. Of all the times I have plugged it into the TV I've never had a problem running it on Windows afterwards. The last time I properly plugged it into the TV was several months ago and again it didn't have a problem running afterwards on my laptop for a good while. Only happened for the first time last night, and it hadn't been plugged into the TV prior to the error messages.

First, I'd download a Linux boot CD and boot off that. See if it can autodetect, mount, and read your external drive. Since the TV could, I'm hoping another Linux distro can. If it can access your data, go ahead and copy it to another drive before attempting to fix this one.

Thanks for this Solandri, I'm going to give this a go before I do anything else as if like you said the TV runs on Linux (which I'm almost certain mine does) then I'm hoping this will work as the TV had no problem recognising the data.

I'm also running EaseUS Data Recovery at the moment, which managed to pick up a few files this morning.

Next, try the free version of MiniTool Partition Wizard. It'll let you see if the partition(s) is still on the drive and show you the partition ID. Windows usually formats external drives as NTFS, so if it's not NTFS that's probably the problem. Try changing it to NTFS and see if that makes the disk readable. If NTFS doesn't work, try the other usual suspects - exFAT and FAT32 being the most likely. If none of these work, set it back to what it was originally. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WRITE OR REPAIR ANYTHING during this process. Your #1 goal is to recover your data. Then you can worry about fixing the drive and cleaning it up.

https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

Repairing a corrupt partition table is trickier. I haven't done it in a while so I don't recall the exact steps. One of the partition management tools on the Ultimate Boot CD had an option to copy the secondary partition table over the primary. Be aware that this is irreversible and can result in total data loss if this wasn't the problem. I only did it after making a complete image of the original drive so I could roll back the changes if it didn't fix it.

Once you get it fixed, please buy another drive so you can make real backups.

Thanks a lot for this mate, I really appreciate the detailed info. A lot of it is over my head at the minute so I'm going to give the Linux boot thing a try first, how do I go about doing that and what is the best software to do it with and where is the best place to download it from? Thanks again

Solandri · Nov 14, 2016

Try an Ubuntu Live CD.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

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Can't access or retrieve data via laptop on Seagate External HDD 1TB / parameter is incorrect

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