re: Corrupted & Inaccessible USB HDD
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 11:43 am
Windows 2000 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by C K
(6157 messages posted)
Quite a few external drive manufacturers are using cheap interface boards that are
known to scramble the HDD beyond recoverability. I find it best to remove the drive
from the enclosure and plug it into a desktop machine's IDE ports and run recovery
software without Windows being booted. I use professional software and if it says
it can't recover anything, then the drive is not recoverable. (www.atl-datarecovery.com
)
If it's not recoverable, you can put the drive into a good encloser or try the original
enclosure. You will have to attempt to partition and reformat the drive in the original
enclosure and take your chances of it happening again or do what I do and use an
enclosure with a reputation of being stable and upgradeable (firmware wise). I've
had the best luck with Acomdata enclosures, and they are usually a little faster
too. If you want to format it in FAT32 in all one big partition, I have a link to
an application that runs in Windows that will do it and bypasses the 32 gig limitation
that W2K and XP impose.
Outside of that, the HDD itself may have gone bad too, but more than likely it is
the enclosure interface, or the fact that it wasn't disconnected and powered down
correctly that did the damage. Either way, I always diagnose drives when connected
internally and not through an enclosures interface for best results..
I've posted the problem of many chipsets being used in enclosures not passing the
flush cache command to the drive and the drive being able to return the acknowledgement
back to Windows issues. I haven't had a problem with Acomdata in this regard. If
one of these enclosures doesn't respond, there is an app locking it and I have to
stop and restart Explorer to be able to use the safely remove hardware icon. Not
using it can scramble any external HDD IME.
On Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 3:59 am, mike wrote:
>Just had message " File or Directory is corrupted and Inaccessible" when attempting
>to open 160G USB HDD, 60G used.. Caddy still lit up, Icon is in my Computer, says
>healthy in Disk Management.
>Does this mean a dead or scrambled HD?
>If so any options , repair/ find deleted files
> software, etc?
>If all data lost, is it likely to work after re-formatting and if so how can this
>be prevented in future?
>Thanks
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