DKowalski

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help me out with my problem. I bought a maxtor 160gb hard drive in a USB external housing about a year ago. It worked just fine until for some reason the housing crapped out and stopped giving power to the hard-drive. Since my warranty just ran out anyways, i figured i'd just pull the actual hard-drive out of the housing and install it right into my computer. It worked just fine for a week or so, i could access all my files and everything, but now its on the fritz again. I was listening to music files from the hard drive when the music cut off suddenly and windows gave me an error message saying the files were corrupt. It asked me to run a disk check, which i did immediately with no results. Now, after the restart, i don't get any error messages. Instead, when i try to browse the hard-drive, it shows no files at all. When I look at Properties though, it says the space is still being used, only 58.8gb of free space out of 152. Can anyone help me out? Is there any more information you need? If there is, please tell me where to find it in detail, im kind of a noob when it comes to this stuff. Thanks!

MaverickUK

Taking the housing off the HDD is a no-no. There's only one solution to this problem; buy a new HDD. You may be able to recover the files once you have a new HDD but i'm pretty sure that the drive is no longer able to read or write to the disc platters. IF you're lucky enough, you may be able to read from the HDD and recover a few files.

I may be wrong on this one, but instinct tells me i'm correct. There may be ways to go around this, but if there is, i'm certainly no help.

ArturoYee

First thing - do not write anything onto the drive - if you do, you may be destroying files that could be recovered.

My guess is that somehow the FAT table got corrupted. If that is the case, the files are still on the drive, you will have to get a good disk recovery utility. File recovery may take a long time - depending on how many files you have. All is not lost - if you are lucky.

BTW: I have a USB external drive box designed for easy drive (IDE) removal - and I install and remove drives into the box without any problems. You do have to ground yourself when handling computer electronics - static electricity is a no-no.

crazijoe

What version of XP (home or pro)? How is the drive formatted (FAT32 or NTFS)?

DKowalski

FAT32, Home version. Does anyone know of a freeware disk recovery utility? I don't feel like paying 70 bucks for software i'm probably only gonna use once.

linderman

Hello:



C-joe is hot on the trail of your dilemma; cant fool that ole bloodhound!



your problem is your partition and fat table has become corrupt, you should NEVER format a drive larger than 127gig as Fat32! Fat32 does not support LBA (logical block addressing) and LBA is essential to get above the 127 gig barrier.

What happens in your situtaiton; is your Fat (file allocation table) has become corrupted

dotn write to the drive any more if you want to try to recover it!

many times in your situtation data will get written into the wrong partition, actually writing over data that should not be getting written over!

the best way to recover is Getdataback
http://www.runtime.org/


as for the pulling the hard drive outta the enclosure, I must disagree with that vehemently; USB external enclosures are normally sold without the drive in them! and I have inserted drive into the enclosures and removed them, installed that drive internally hordes of times! and never had a single drive failure.

In fact I routinely use external drives to transport my construction auto cad drawings from job site to office and then to architects offices and clients offices.

Many of the times I am given a work station to use for my presentations which are old and dont have USB 2.0 support that when I remove the drive from the enclosure and connect it internally to the "old beast" I am stuck working with!

let me tell ya, its very annoying to try using cad drawings on a USB 1.0 speed

unfortunately; you stuck with two decisions, buy the recovery program or reformat the drive and lose all data

in the end regardless of which path you choose >>>>> get that drive into the NTFS file system

if you do a reformat on the drive >>>> just use NTFS during format If you use the recovery program to get your data back; then after the recovery is successful and completed use the drive converter to change your fat32 drive to NTFS

ArturoYee

How much you want to pay depends on the value of the data you want to recover.

There are free software out there - and some may be very good. And some costly software may be poor.

If you are brave, google:

free data recovery

I would follow the recomendations posted if you are not sure!

Just remember - there is not much room for error - read the instructions very carefully. Reading the manual before you start would be a very good idea. And be patient. It may take some time.

dai

someone reported success with the first one listed here last week on a fat file system
http://www.techsupportforum.com/hard...softwares.html