2018-02-08 23:23:30

Hey and good evening everyone.
So great, an already stressfull week got worse today. I was in the process of copying some files from a friends harddrive to my own when there were suddenly errors coming up that the files can not be copied successfully because the destination is not reachable, a network storage device or an empty CD-Rom drive.
I than disconnected the drive and when I plugged it back in it took quite some time for it to show up in the windows explorer.
When I clicked on the now named local storage named harddrive, it told me that the drive couldn't be accessed. I than looked at the propertys of the harddrive and it told me that there were 0 bytes of storage space and 0 bytes still available.
I than tryed plugging the HDD into my friends computer and the autoplay dialogue popped up and gave the suggestion to fix the drive what we did than.
When I plugged the drive back into the USB port on my machine, it came back as Harddrive1, so the name i gave to it.
When I looked at the properties, it gave me the correct storage used and space remaining numbers.
But, here comes the strange part, when I open the drive, I see all the folders and files in the root directory, but all the folders are empty and media files give a VLC error that they can not be played.
So, I don't know what the heck is going on, empty folders, but still an almost full harddrive? I don't get it.
Fact is though that I can't access my files.
is there someone around here knowing what to do? I want to get a new HDD anyway, so even if it's just a quick and dirty backup solution, I am thankfull for every idea you guys have, guess that drive is going into the trash when, if it is even possible to recover my data.
Thanks in advance.
Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2018-02-08 23:37:05

sounds like the file headers have been damaged but not sure how to fix it. scandisk seems an obvious choice but probably too obvious and won't work. you could try a chkdsk /f from a command prompt with the letter for the drive but again, probably not going to be effective enough. if you know the make and model of the drive the manufacturors usually have their own diagnostic software on their websites so that may be worth a try.

Who's that trip trapping over My bridge? Come find out.

2018-02-08 23:49:07

sorry to double post but I just did some checking and it does sound like a mft problem. if it is the master file table chkdsk should fix it. just open a command promt by hitting windows key plus R and typing cmd then hit enter. then type chkdsk /f then the drive letter for the drive you want to check. example, chkdsk /f f: and don't forget the colon. lol.

if it can't fix it, again as I mentioned earlier, try going to the manufacturor's website and see if they have a disk repair tool. all the big ones usually do. I may have some knocking about somewhere but I'm too lazy to check rite now but I know maxtore, Seagate, western digital, Toshiba etc all have their own diagnostics.

Who's that trip trapping over My bridge? Come find out.

2018-02-09 00:07:51

Hi.
Thanks for your quick answer.
I tried the chkdsk command as you described, the problem is that it throws an error that the file system is raw and that chkdsk is not available for raw filesystems. Strangely though, when i check the drives properties, it shows the file system as NTFS.
Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2018-02-09 00:22:48 (edited by SirBadger 2018-02-09 00:25:57)

now that's strange. only thing I can suggest then is to try the manufacturer for a diagnostic or if you can let me know the make I can have a look for you.

I did find an article about NTFS drives showing as raw as well if you want to check it out. not sure if it'll help but it might.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/283 … tion-drive

Who's that trip trapping over My bridge? Come find out.

2018-02-09 00:27:36

hi
My girl had this issue a while ago, I tracked it down to corrupt segments[boot sector problems ETC],
It took a long time, and a lot of swearing, to fix and included reformatting the entire thing.
First of all, grab recuva, which will rover all your data for you.
then its up to you, either grab a hammer, smack the old drive and chuck it in the bin and get a new one, or after a little bit of research you should be able to find how to reformat it through command line, and fix the issue, with the risk of it happening again.

Nathan Smith
Managing Director of Nathan Tech
It's not disability
It's ability!

2018-02-09 00:33:02 (edited by SirBadger 2018-02-09 00:43:02)

I've never tried recuva but the investigating I just did mentioned that a lot and it does say it will usually be able to get all the data off the drive so good suggestion. I'd actually try that first then go down the route of looking at the forum post I mentioned in post 5 if you have no luck.
here's a link to download recuva which has a nice little audio tutorial telling you the basics as well:

https://filehippo.com/download_recuva/d … 86feae9df/


or here's a drop box link to download it without buggering about:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/65ba2jf5j8dph … 3.exe?dl=0

Who's that trip trapping over My bridge? Come find out.

2018-02-09 00:44:41

Hi.
Two things.
Badger, I did try the methods suggested in the forum post you linked, but sadly changing the drive letter won't help.
It would be cool if you could look for the WD elements diagnostic tool because for some odd reason, the website doesnt work for me, at leased I can't get to the download page.
Darder, I tried recuva, but well, another error on that, when I try scanning the harddrive which is now showing as local disk.harddisk volume 3, I get the error that it can't determine gthe file system.
Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2018-02-09 02:35:04

I've had a surprising amount of luck by just connecting the drive to a mac and running the disk repair tool from utilities.
That said though, since you already tried fixing it on Windows, you may be past that point.

2018-02-09 03:07:52 (edited by SirBadger 2018-02-09 03:30:55)

ok think these are for wd elements. should be anyway.

WD discovery:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ba3ikwnjd52uk … 8.zip?dl=0



WD utilities:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0w466y2hunhk … 5.zip?dl=0

I haven't played with them as I don't hav a wd drive handy. actually come to think of it I do have a raptor upstairs somewhere but I'm being lazy again.

let me know how you get on.

Who's that trip trapping over My bridge? Come find out.

2018-02-09 05:05:51

lol, lol!
"either grab a hammer, smack the old drive and chuck it in the bin and get a new one"

Your drive took a while to show up in explorer, and that makes something very clear. This is always a problem and has been a problem with every single external hard drive out there. Those drives do have a serial ATA to USB card into them which works for a while but its so sadly delicate that it becomes horribly weak and you get unreliable connections all of the time. Whether windows is good at reporting connection and disconnection events with sounds is a completely different story. Its better if you open the drive (most of those are just plastic that can come off using a little hand pressure or slightly prying the edges with some flat screwdrivers) and then put that bare, or naked, drive into a hard drive dock to do all recovery operations on it. Hopefully you can get some data back! Connecting it via USB will just keep on completely ruining it.
Of course, you should get a plastic bag or a thin plastic CD sleeve to be able to put the drive away and store it to protect it from dust and other stuff.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

2018-02-09 06:08:13 (edited by Jason SW 2018-02-09 06:11:28)

Hello,

I've never actually used it myself, but I've heard a lot of good things about this product. The other thing is that I don't know if it's accessible, but if nothing else works, if you have the money, and if you have someone available who can read the screens for you, this might work. It's called SpinRite. It's available from https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm. If I recall correctly, it's about $80 USD, but (going by the hundreds of positive reviews I've seen) very worth the price.

2018-02-09 08:47:48

@11 not helpful or informative but at least slightly amusing. problem with external drives usually comes up when there is an operating system glitch or more often, which sounds like the case here, the drive has been removed without ejecting it properly which results in a master file table problem.

as for post 12, that's one I've never tried but i'll put that on my list of things to check out next time I'm fixing one and find out if it's blind friendly.

Who's that trip trapping over My bridge? Come find out.

2018-02-09 16:43:49

Not helpful?
I don't know about that, allot of people have had success with external SATA to USB enclosures because of said shitty boards.
But no, it's not the main issue for most drives, your right, it's almost always simpler than that.
Not really too impressed with the suggested removal method either LOL though stuff can be glued and riveted together enough now to wear it may be the only way if you don't have the tools and patients.

2018-02-10 00:52:29 (edited by revan 2018-02-10 00:58:49)

hi, I wanted to share my knowledge to you and all forum members about these hard drive failures
do you dropped accidentaly your hard drive?
2 did you listen the sound very closely?
drives do not like dropping
dropping causes platter damage
there's read-write heads flying inside the hard drive when you powering on
If you heard grinding, whining, buzzing sound in your drive,  there's heads definitely damaged
It will clicks,  this means your hard drive platter getting damaged,  so if platters becomes unreadable,  heads will hit and crack the plattersmy advice to everyone who owns the usb hard drives,  do not reject drive when in use, especially in power
interrupting power will damage and make contact heads with platters
that's why we calling head crash
this will lead nonreadable bad sectors
download the hd tune tool, make error scan,  it will show how many damaged blocks in it
hd tune will analyze the bad non readable sectors
If you see alot of damaged blocks,  there's no way to rid them
all hard drives have lifespan
every hard drive will get fail anytime
no matter you buy barracuda pro,  or seagate barracuda standart drive
all drives are same the inside,  a read write laser head,  and platters
this technology not been changed
one thing last, western digital hard driveshave firmware problem
there's called service area in the platters,  If service area gets damaged,  it will become slower,  unresponsive,  and laggy
hd sentinel is very useful program too it will check your drive condition  and report text file,  it will repair too if platters damaged from bad software
if your drive platter damaged from head,  there's no way to fix
recuva will help if your drive's sectors readable
if sectors not readable,  no way to get your files back

2018-02-10 01:00:19

Hmmm.
had this happening with a 32gb drive, it died all of a sudden, no chance to get the stuff off of it, but I was only transfering it.
I have had 3 drives basically die in a row, one of them a seagate was new.
The other, a wd elements ran for 5 years straight, and was on all the time.
It died, a mybook I had but rarely used just died.
I was able to recover one of the drives but while I got most of it recovered the rest had mangled files if it wasn't for my half dead seagate I wouldn't have got most of my stuff back.
I am seriously thinking about either getting idrive or dropbox, then then buying expandrive and backuping all my data to a virtual network drive, it all costs a lot but maybe that may have to be the way.
Ofcause I am not sure how expandrive deals with sharing links or things so who knows.
Still its an option.
I started to investigate in getting a server not just for backups but for other things to, since with my brother getting a new house, his poky little shitty closet of a room will be available.
It will have a piano in it and maybe some other things, meanwile its probably perfect for a server of some sort to run.
No one in their right mind is going to fucking sit there for a long period anyway.
Its chief disadvantage is that its only window faces outside to the street and is low, it also gets direct sun.
I know that it is possible to have a pc in there as at one time there was one, and while it ran hot we are going to work on the ventilation, even with that sorted the fact is there will not be much of a space in there for much and another tower will be the best place for that.
The other is taking part of the studdy with the main computer spaces in there to have on if he moves his old box and such, but that in itself could be a problem, but it all depends.

2018-02-10 01:26:57

One thing I always say whenever I can. Backup, backup, backup!

Never, ever, ever, ever store anything you care about on only one drive. Every hard drive, no matter the manufacturer, model, or how old it is, *will* eventually fail unless you stop using it first.

2018-02-10 01:27:33

so, probably me describing dismantling some drives I had some time ago done all by myself was totally not helpful at all,so so so sorry. You cannot believe how terribly sorry I am that probably trying a different enclosure would perhaps give you a better chance of recovering your data. So, hopefully this is even less helpful. SpinRite is not accessible at all because it runs into its own dos environment. Get someone to read the screen to you. It might be able to recover things, as long as your premium, elite internal USB to SATA interface does a wonderful job of giving you continuous power for about 4 hours or more, depending on drive size.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

2018-02-13 16:34:33 (edited by flyby chow 2018-02-13 16:39:02)

warning, i except no liability for  lost data or damaged drives, follow advice at own risk.
okay, now that is out of the way. lets get cracking.
I know the stress you whent through as i face it oh so  to often, hence i follow the backup root. but lets see what we can do to help you here.
a note of warning.  some seagate external drives, can be opened and the sata board can be removed. but with W D drives, often the board is sealed to the drive. or, in crippted to mate only with the board. thus, attempting to use it in any other in closure, will result in garbled data. things you can now try. one. please, power down the drive. 2. connect the drive to a power bank and record the sounds for me. 3. we'll take it from there. 4. i am always curious to try and repair such issues.
5. if you do not wish to record this. move to step6.

6. download data life guard diagnostic tool for WD drives. its very accessible and will diagnose /repair bad sectors. if not sure ware to get it, let me know and I'll pop ya a link.
7.  if you found it, let me know the outcome.
after it had fixed your drive, warning, make sure you have patience since this may take a while to complete.
do not use the drive while data life guards busy with it. your data is already at risk, so reparing what you can, is fine at this point. since data damage has already happened.

8. please place your pc in hi performance mode under power settings. and plug it in to charger when working with the drive. if pc is laptop.
9. if its a desktop. plug drive in the back of pc u s b port.
to insure maximum stable power.
10. if all the above fails. please get back to me ware and witch step failed.
I'd be happy to help.

There's a place for me in this universe.

2018-02-13 16:51:53

Hi.
Thanks for all your tips people.
I will try if a linux machine maybe will still recognize the drive and still read my data off it, if that fails as well, I will see to fly by chau's method.
Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2018-02-13 23:14:59

quick things
the board are not sealed with wd drives, it can be open, you have to remove screws but changing circuit board won't help either
the drive will not work after swapping the donor circuit board
cause their firmware recorded in the drive platters,  service area
best regards,  that just was my correction don't get wrong

2018-03-23 15:51:39

I recommend you to try this Disk Drill for Windows https://www.pandorarecovery.com/hard-dr … overy.html . It worked fine for me, when my external hard disk suddenly stopped working. I was trying to connect to the laptop but nothing showed up. The hard disk was not even making any sound. I was lucky to find this Disk Drill app. I hope you find it effective too.

2018-03-25 09:41:14

There's something I'm surprised no one's mentioned yet. It's a lot of technical information, but have you had a look at the drive's SMART data?

For a while now, hard drives and SSDs have kept internal logs of how long they've been running, any damaged areas, and tons of other manufacturer-dependent data.
It'd be awesome if you could get that SMART data.  A very nice tool exists to read this data, as well as perform some drive tests and set more technical parameters. You can get it from smartmontools.sf.net. Once that's installed, open an administrator command prompt, and run:
smartctl -a h: > documents\smart.txt
Replace h with the actual drive letter. In a few seconds, you should get the prompt back. Open your my documents folder, and there should be a text file called smart.txt. If you wouldn't mind, could you post that somewhere? Feel free to review it first, but it should not contain anything personal to you or your data.

I'd be happy to help you with this, I know I kinda glossed over some of the more technical bits here.
Hope this helps!

"Actually, they're just super-advanced holograms created for the sole purpose of enriching a children's cardgame."

2018-03-25 12:56:41

Hi.
Sorry for not updating in a while, but actually, attaching the drive to a raspberry pi running rasbian lite made the trick, I could mount the HD and recover all the data from that thing.
I got rid of it after that because well, I can't really use a drive which doesn't work properly anymore. But, I guess the Harddrive went out in style.
I am currently practicing mounted archery in my free time, just for fun and because it's quite interesting, and well, the harddrive was screwed on to the target and was defined the bulls eye, I guess you know where that went xD.
Greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2018-05-07 20:03:15

Hey,
feel free to check out this hard drive recovery on Windows https://www.cleverfiles.com/hard-drive- … overy.html . It worked fine for me, when my external hard disk suddenly stopped working. I was trying to connect to the laptop but nothing showed up. The hard disk was not even making any sound. I was lucky to find this Disk Drill app. I hope you find it effective too.