ok, so back in 2001 [or somewhere thereabouts] I got a desktop made by HP. Then in 2005, I upgraded to a laptop by Dell. When I did this, I saved the old HDD from the desktop and bought an external drive encasement so that I could use it for extra storage. The old HDD is a maxtor, Diamondmax 16 60GB ATA/133 HDD. It has worked for the past year and done fine, maybe a little slow at times, but still worked fine. so I store all of my medical, personal, photos, records etc. on it. It is partitioned I guess into two HD's a 5GB and a 55GB. I keep a lot of my very important data on this disk. Anyway, so I moved recently and plugged it in and it said "Error, disk is not formatted, would you like to format it now?" which i clicked on "NO" as it has very valiable info on it that i don't want to loose. I tried it on my girlfriends laptop as well and got the same results. How is it that it could have been working fine and then now it seems to have trouble being read and such that it thinks it needs to be formatted? I need to get to the data on these disks and can't afford to loose all of it by reformatting them. How should I go about fixing this? Any tips or suggestions are greatly greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
HDD Troubles, Please please Help!
- Thread starter emptymush
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Well I wouldn't assume yet that your hard drive may have completely failed. What I would check is if the connection for the hard drive in the USB case (I assume you have it convert from ATA to USB with that external case) that connectors are secure or not damage.
sPlAtOiD
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Here are some programs that will help you get your data back you can probably find a shareware copy of one of these.I had the same problem with to 300 gig hard drives about 2 weeks age and got about 97% of my data back.
Active Undelete v5.1.010
Easy Recovery v6.04
Final Data Enterprise v2.0
Get Data Back v2.1
Recover My Files v3.22
Hope this helps. Good luck
Active Undelete v5.1.010
Easy Recovery v6.04
Final Data Enterprise v2.0
Get Data Back v2.1
Recover My Files v3.22
Hope this helps. Good luck
yes, I've unscrewed the casing to check *ALL* the connections, not just the USB, and it is none of these so far as I can tell. I can't seem to "explore" or otherwise view the contents of the drive without getting the question about formatting. I think that a few days ago I may have read something of an error message regarding "parameters" though I don't remember exactly. I'm most curious if there is a way to set this back up so that I don't have to format it or any such thing but will be able to get it back in working order. Everything seems to be working fine, except that I can't seem to view any of the files on it.
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I think it would be a bad idea to format and try to get your data back. You should leave everything the way it is now. The problem might not be your hard drive but the USB converter, so how about connecting it as a slave to your new computer to check up on it.
how would i do that? the usb is working in thevsense that windows reads that there are 2 external hard drives connected when they are. Also, my new pc is a laptop so i'm not sure how i could slave it. any advice? since it recognizes them and says that they aren;t formatted, would that indicate a usb converter error or what? Should i just quickformat aand then try to recover all my valuable data? eeek. I don't want to lose this stuff, but I need to make it accessible in windows.
Don't Format it! Partition table is messed up. There are a number of programs that will scan over and recover the files. The fact that it does show up in Windows is good. Recover My Files is a good program. http://www.recovermyfiles.com Its not free, about $70 but it does work well in these situations. I think you can download it free to see if it can acually find your files, then pay for it to actually allow it to recover them. The Fast Format Recover and Complete Format Recover searches are the best way to go with this program. Good luck
ok, I obtained Recover My Files 3.97 and it had been able to recover [it is currently running] some of my files, and supposing that it can recover all of the files, I don't have space to put 60 gigs of recovered files on. How do I fix my drives, preferably so that I don't have to lose any of that info on them, but should I have to recover that info first, how do I fix them so that I can save the recovered info to those same drives? An odd query I know, but I just don't have the free space to
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