Open to any suggestions of HD failure

[mziese1]

Three years ago I went out and purchased 2 Seagate external firewire drives fo storing my photographs. They both were working fine up until this morning when I went to access an old shot on one of them. That is when the drive started to make a sick sound. I immediately took a new spare external HD I recently purchased and started to try and move the folders and files to it. I was successful with about half of them (30,000 or so files) when Windows Explorer froze up on the click and drag of a folder. All of a sudden I get this error message stating that the drive wasn't formatted and was prompted to perform a partitioning and format. Of course I did do that. But my system was hung up. I immediately checked the second drive on the daisy chain and was fine. I had to cold (forced) reboot my system. When it came back up the drive was seen as an attached drive, but any attempt to access files or folders failed. As a matter of fact, when I was able to get into a folder, no files of subfolders were listed. I was lucky enough to transfer about half of the files before the drive started to really act up.

I did a google for data recovery software and downloaded 2 that said they were very successful at recovering data from crashed drives, bad FATs and sectors. I tried them but nothing seems to work. I tried to run "error checking" from the windows tool pallet and also "chkdsk" from the system prompt, but they both failed.

My question is... am I "S" out of luck? Or is there something else I can do to try and recover my photos?

I was thinking of maybe cracking open the external case and seeing if I could connect the drive to an internal HD controller. Does anyone here thnk this may work? My reason behind this is i am thinking that hopefully the controller inside the unit is at fault and since the partition is FAT32, I should be able to see it as a secondary drive on another PC.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Oh... one other thing...! How the "H" do you open these SeaGate enclosures?

 

[g-paw]

In all likelihood when you formatted you wiped the files out, should never format if you have data you want to save. Trying recovery with the hdd installed internally is a good idea. In all likelihood you'll have to break the case open with out damaging the drive. For future reference, this is why it's best to assemble your own external drive

 

[mziese1]

Thanks for responding to my inquiry... but you misunderstand. The drives came initially formatted in FAT32. I haven't reformatted the drive... The windows "disk management" utility is stated that the drive need to be formatted. An error in a way, since it already was formatted and has 64,000 digital photo files on it.

What I would like to know is. Does anyone think it maybe possible that the controller card in the housing may be bad?

 

[g-paw]

It could be a bad controller, which is why installing it internally would be a good idea. It's also possible that given it's FAT32 and you have 64,000 photos it 100% full given the maximum capcity of FAT32 is somewhere around 130GB regardless of the size of the drive. I know that Partition Magic will let you convert a FAT32 to NTFS without affecting the data but not sure if you convert with Windows. If a drive is over something like 85% to 90% full you can have trouble reading it. Really strange it was formatted as FAT32

 

[SomeJoe7777]

It could be a bad controller, which is why installing it internally would be a good idea. It's also possible that given it's FAT32 and you have 64,000 photos it 100% full given the maximum capcity of FAT32 is somewhere around 130GB regardless of the size of the drive. I know that Partition Magic will let you convert a FAT32 to NTFS without affecting the data but not sure if you convert with Windows. If a drive is over something like 85% to 90% full you can have trouble reading it. Really strange it was formatted as FAT32

FAT32's maximum volume size is theoretically 8 TB with 32k clusters, but is actually limited to 2 TB because of MBR partitioning limitations.

A limit of 137 GB (127 GiB) is from 28-bit LBA limitations, which are limitations in the BIOS or disk drivers that affect any file system, not just FAT32. Driver limitations were corrected in Windows XP SP1.

OP: Open the external case, install the drive internally. Try GetDataBack for FAT to see if it can recover any files. It make take a long time (several hours, sometimes days) to scan the drive. If that can't recover anything, you'll have to send the drive to a recovery specialist.