Hard drive not working.

[toniniman]

Hi,
My hard drive is not working anymore, it gets detected by windows but i do not see any data inside and i get the message that it needs to be formatted, can anyone help, I never dropped it.
Thanks antonio

 

[MechaNintendoMaster]

It's dieing or somethings wrong.I had a harddrive like that.

After closer inspection the drive was making some noise. Listen to yours, is it sounding ususal?

What kind of drive is it? If it's a Seagate several people have had problems with them.

 

[toniniman]

Hi, Mecha, thanks for replying, model is a Toshiba Store Alu 3.5, the sound is as normal as usual....any extra advice???
Thanks

 

[toniniman]

Dear Zip, it is a Toshiba Hard drive of 650GB...
http://www.toshiba-multimedia.com/eu/store-external-hard-drives/

 

[toniniman]

Sorry 640GB.....

 

[lihuahellen]

When you format a computer hard drive you will lose everything that is on the drive. It is very important to back up anything .Additionally, you need to make sure you have the discs for any applications or third party hardware
1. Right-Click on the "My Computer" icon and select "Manage."
2. Select "Storage" and double-click "Disk Management (local)"
3. Partitions are separations of space on a drive. Unless you are doing something specific that requires multiple partitions, you only want one partition per drive.
4. You must delete any existing partitions on the drive you are going to format. Do this by right-clicking on the partition's box and selecting "Delete Partition..."
If you only want to format one partition that is OK

 

[lihuahellen]

Hi,
My hard drive is not working anymore, it gets detected by windows but i do not see any data inside and i get the message that it needs to be formatted, can anyone help, I never dropped it.
Thanks antonio

Hardware problems are physical flaws that prevent the discs from spinning and accessing data. Software problems are digital mixups that make retrieving data more difficult.

1. Look for grinding sounds from your drive or humming that starts or stops.
These are signs that the actuator arm and discs are no longer in alignment and your drive is timing out.
2. Run one of the many software fixes

3. Remove the many tiny screws that holds the drive together.
4. Determine if you've set things straight.
5. Put everything back together and check that everything in your external hard drive is working properly.
6. Try using the external hard drive on another computer.

 

[toniniman]

Dear Lilhuahellen,
Sound is as normal as always, I found now a Recover data softaware which helped me to recover already a lot of data ....However I still have a lot of files that i would like to retrieve form the HD..I would like to fix the HD has it is not a software issue but an hardware problem...do you have any advice??? Thanks a lot.

 

[fzabkar]

Run CHKDSK in readonly mode. Do not allow it to "fix" anything. This will tell you if there are any file system problems.

If you suspect that your drive may have bad sectors, try a comprehensive SMART diagnostic. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

See this article for SMART info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

The safest thing to do is to clone your drive, sector-by-sector, and then work on the clone.

Ddrescue or dd_rescue both know how to skip over bad patches in the media. They will clone the easy sectors on the first pass, and then try for the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. You can also clone the drive in reverse. This will effectively disable read lookahead caching.

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

Could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine it.

 

[toniniman]

Thanks Fzabkar, I'll try this and let you know the outcome.

 

[toniniman]

Thanks everyone, at the end i manage to recover with RECUVA almost all the files in my crashed HD, I recovered 630 GB. However Thanks for the help.

 

[toniniman]

Best answer selected by toniniman.