Help, Help, Help

Hello out there,

One of my 3 tb disk drives seems to have malfunctioned. When I show the computers, it is listed as a local disk drive. When I double click it, it responds with:

H:\ is not accessible.
The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

When it first comes online (plugged in), it suggests that the drive be reformattted.

H:\ contains my default profile. Thank God, I backed up the default profile to another drive last night. However, this drive also contains some other valuable information. Other than reformatting, is there any other way I can recover this other information which it not backed up? Is it possible for Seagate (the manufacturer) to recover this data? Can I do it myself?

What causes this to happen? Is there any way to avoid it? Oh boy, I think I'm in real trouble.



Richard Rein



[Moderator edit: added topic description. jgw]

Is this drive internal or external. If it is an external drive how is it connected to the pc?

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. This drive is an external USB.

Richie

Press windows+R key and type

diskmgmt.msc and click ok

Right click on the H drive and change the drive letter

Try to open the drive now.

If that doesnt work,connect the USB to another PC and see if you can back up your data

good luck

Hi Narenxp,

The only other computers I have at this location all have Windows XP which is unable to recognize a 3tb partition. Also, I don't have another drive large enough to accommodate all the files on the H: drive.

Richie

Are you able to see the drive in Windows Xplorer? If so on the drive and select the tools tab and select scan for errors,

To Narenxp: When the drive is plugged in I get the following message: "You need to format the drive before you can use it." When I change the drive letter, I get the same message.

To Sneakycyber: Using Windows Explorer, I don't see an option to scan for errors from the tools tab. When I double click the H: drive it says "H:\ is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."

It seems strange that when I touch the drive I can feel the head moving even though it's doing nothing.

Richie

Instead of double clicking on the drive icon right click on it and select properties. It the properties window click the tools tab, under error-checking select check now. When the scan window opens check both options to Automatically scan for errors, and Scan for and attempt to recover bad sectors. On a 3tb drive this will take SEVERAL hours.

Are you sure this won't cause any additional damage?

Download Easeus Todo backup free edition and back up the entire drive. For best results creat two images the first do a standard disc back up unchecking the sector by sector option. This option is faster and will be less intensive on the hdd components. The second do a complete back up with sector by sector. Should the physical drive fail before completing data recovery you can use the sector by sector image to recover the lost data using recovery software.

Edit: you should also download the drive manufactures utility and Scan the disc to determine if there is a physical failure of the drive, or only corrupt file system.

Hi,

I tried the manufacturer's software. It didn't work. I can't backup the disk. It is totally inaccessible unless I re-format it. I am not able to back it up anyway because I don't have a medium large enough to back it up to. I will be contacting the manufacturer and other recovery services to recover the data and see who has better prices and reputation. I only need some of the data. Since I purchased this drive used less than six months ago, the vendor is willing to replace it.

Richie

Hi Richie

We can take a look at the partition table and see if it can be repaired. If it can't, then we can look at recovering the important files.
Download TestDisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-6.13.win.zip
and unzip it to your desktop.

In the folder you should see a program called testdisk_win.exe
Please double click it to run it.It is a console based program and not GUI so you'll use your keyboard to navigate the options instead of a mouse.

Choose CREATE and press enter (we always want a log when we can get one in case things get weird)

Select the external drive from the list (let me know if you aren't sure which it is) and hit enter to PROCEED

Select INTEL and hit enter

Select ANALYSE and hit enter

Let me know if it lists any partitions here. Write them down for me and then proceed

Select QUICK SEARCH and hit enter

I just did this with a 1.5TB external drive to try and make sure that I don't tell you to do anything stupid and the Quick Search took quite awhile. It may take a couple of hours on your drive. It may take a couple of minutes. You never know.

You should now see a list of partition(s) again. Let me know what it sees now and if the text is green, red or white. It might tell you that there is damage or that a repair can be performed. Let me know if it does. You need to be my eyes

Do not do anything yet. If you need to close the program keep pressing q until it closes, we can get back to this point again later.

If you can take pictures or screenshots of the two partition screens and post them that would be fine. Otherwise just type what you saw in your reply.

James

Even if I can see the files, I need a place to put them. If this drive is not recoverable, I'm out of luck. There will be no place to put the files. Will this method recover the drive? The drive has only one partition, which I now realize was a mistake.

Richie

If you are able to repair the partition with TestDisk, it will be like it never broke.

James

EDIT: I have a pretty high success rate doing this with external drives.

Thanks. I'll give it a try later today or tomorrow.

Richie