Posted February 17, 2012 Hi Guys, Having a problem with my external harddrive here (yes the new one I bought just after new years too) I plug it into the USB port, light comes on all seems fine. But when go to computer is not displayed as "Toshiba Ext HDD (G: )" as it usually does, it instead displays as "Local Disk (G: )" And when I try to open it then to access the files on it it tells me it needs to be formatted.... obviously as I have like 500GB of data and backups on it I haven't done that. I've tried it in the other ports and same thing... tested the ports with other devices to make sure it wasn't an actual port issue and all other devices work fine so it is likely the harddrive is the issue. I don't have another laptop with me to test it in another system but I tried it on my bluray player as I used that to watch videos on the HDD through to Bluray player to the TV but now the player doesn't even recognise the HDD. Anyone have any ideas how I might fix this without formatting it so that I might recover the files on it? I even tried to run a CHKDSK on it, didn't work. It was only able to tell me it was a NTFS file system then it says "unable to determine volume version and state" and aborts Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 17, 2012 Does the hard disk plug into a power supply? If not, is there any chance you've changed USB cable? It might not be supplying enough power to the drive. That would normally mean the drive doesn't show up at all though, or intermittently. Other than that, sounds like the drive might have simply become corrupt, which happens. Doesn't necessarily mean your data is unrecoverable. However if it's just backups, it won't be too much trouble to reformat and refill it right? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 17, 2012 (edited) No same cable it came with. Yeah making new back up of the laptop wouldn't be much hassle I guess (just takes time) But I'd say 400GB of that 500GB was files I don't have on my laptop (Pictures, Music and mainly videos....prolly mostly videos) EDIT: Actually thinking about the videos I'm prolly not worried that much about, could always redownload them... though again takes time....and my ISP might end up saying I've gone over my "fair use" policy for downloads It's the photos that I really don't want to lose, whenever the cameras SD card filled I'd always just copy the files to my external HDD for storage and then wiped the cards. Didn't have some stored on the actual laptop but the majority were on the external Gah... won't format it yet... if you know of any (free) recoverey software might help let me know. Next time I might buy a 2nd HDD to backup the backup Edited February 17, 2012 by Mokong Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 17, 2012 Try accessing the drive from ubuntu if you still have it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 17, 2012 Next time I might buy a 2nd HDD to backup the backup It's not a backup if the stuff is only in one place! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 17, 2012 Try accessing the drive from ubuntu if you still have it. Ah yeah I did try that at the begining too... Ubuntu couldn't even see the HDD It's not a backup if the stuff is only in one place! Indeed, haha, I just always tried to take better care of the external HDD than the actual laptop. Always figured if one was gonna fail it would be the laptop... especially since this is a new external HDD (1TB)... In hindsight I should have kept my old external HDD (250GB) to have extra copies of files only on the 1TB... instead I gave it to my sister cause she didnt have one and always complained she needed extra storage space *facepalm* Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 19, 2012 (edited) Got (most of) my files back Took all weekend almost, in the end couldn't find a free way to sort it out and started looking at different recovery softwares. Ended up spening 60euro on one called RecoverMyFiles (http://www.getdata.com) And had to borrow another HDD to have somewhere to save the files to when found. (If someone now suggests a free or cheaper software I could have used I'll be very upset that you didn't post sooner) Took a while (by which I mean it takes A LONG TIME) but I eventually got it working... it crashed twice on me, though may have been my own fault, first time in the middle of the scan it just stopped working... though I think it may not have liked that I was doing other things on the laptop at the same time :P 2nd attempt when it was nearly finished (7 hours of scanning) and I decided to then plug in the borrowed HDD.. I guess I should have waited for it to finish first cause as soon as I did it froze up :P 3rd time lucky. Left on over night with both HDD's plugged in just in case. After another 7 hours of scanning the broken drive I was then able to start saving the recovered files to another HDD. The lenght of time it takes to scan the corrupt drive depends on size of course (it also works on SD cards and Thumbdrives FYI), mine was a 1TB drive, after 7 hours of scanning it had searched 300million blocks of 1.9billion, it what it said. But based on the number of files it said it had found and it allows you to browse the files names and view previews of picture and document files, I figured it had found most the files by this stage anyway. I left it for another hour just in case but the number of files "found/recovered" didn't change so figured I was find. Stopped the scan and was then able to start moving the recovered files to another drive, which I've now done. Formatted the old HDD now, but will probably look at getting a 2nd one just incase the first one decides to not work again. Here's a video of the software in action The drive used in the video shows the same symptoms as what mine did... appearing as local and asking to format in My Computer, and appearing a RAW in Disk Management, which is why I decided to shell out the cash for it. And considering I was able to recover pretty much 3 - 4 years worth of photos I had recently moved off my laptop to the external drive (which I though was for safe keeping ) I'd say it was worth the cost. Edited February 19, 2012 by Mokong Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 20, 2012 Your 13 year plan to sign up to these forums, integrate yourselves as one of us just so that you could one day advertise RecoverMyFiles has finally come to fruition But seriously, glad you got a positive outcome. There are free programs for that kind of thing, but in my experience they rarely get such good results. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 20, 2012 I'm only here 10 years Shorty Haha, guess that post did sound a bit of an advertisment, sorry... though it might come in helpfull if ever anyone else here finds themselves in a similar situation so figured I should give my full experience of how it worked for me. For a moment I was thinking of saying "feck it" and just formatting the drive, but when I saw that vid showing him recover files off a drive showing the exact same symptoms as mine I figured it was like a sign to just shell out the cash Recovered something like 12000 photos and most of my video/tv show files. I actually didn't then save some files/shows though just to speed things up a bit when saving them to the other HDD and just kept the ones I'm most likely to rewatch Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 21, 2012 I was just taking a guess tbh, but I've just noticed that your join date is before we launched these forums? Haha :p Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Posted February 21, 2012 Haha yeah it's the only way I remember which year it was I actually found/joined this place. So back when we first made the move from Xzorbit *shudder* to vBulletin I edited my join date to reflect the original Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
