Forgive me if these questions are answered elsewhere, perhaps I'm not doing the search properly.
I have 5 physical drives in my computer, none of which are partitioned. Yesterday, I updated the drivers for my motherboard to get rid of that pesky co-processor always showing up in Device Manager. After installing the drivers, one of my 3TB hard drives suddenly cannot be accessed.
Drive shows up in BIOS boot, shows up in Disk Manager, and shows up in Windows Explorer. However, when I try to access the disk, it tells me I need to format the disk in order to use it. Once I click cancel, it shows the following the message:
G:\ is not accessible. The drive cannot find the sector requested.
This hard drive was nearly full of data that I would really prefer not to lose. So I don't want to risk formatting and trying to recover the data that way. I was hoping that somehow the indexes got deleted and it would just be a matter of re-creating them.
Any suggestions or a finger pointed in the right direction is greatly appreciated as it would save me about a months worth of extra work recovering all that I lost (thats a conservative estimate, to be honest). Thank you in advance!
One thing I did forget, I tried a system restore, but it only had a restore point to a Windows Update which I did after the driver update and after the drive was no longer recognised. Shame on me for not doing a restore before updating/installing drivers.
You really need to post the tech details of the drive make model etc that's' basic thing when requesting help in any forum. Why does everyone think formatting the drive is somehow a path to data recovery ? Especially when running Win7 which writes zeros's to the drive effectively wiping all data no recovery possible ! DON'T DO IT ! And don't do the freezer thing either ok
Each drive has to have a partition on it ! otherwise you can't create a file system.
Try removing one of the other drives and see if the 3TB can be read. You can download R-Studio trial and scan the drive to see if it can find any data. It will take a long time no matter what tool you use its 3TB of drive to scan. Recuva is free and a good tool. I am not a fan of these huge drives too many early failures to be comfortable a lot of the failures are drive head related as well.
Was getting Read disk G: at "X" failed after 1 attempts. The drive cannot find the sector requested (27). This error message had been appearing since about 30%, before that it was showing there was data on the disc.
Sounds a lot like the drive is having a lot of problems "reading" and no sofware tool can "fix" that or get around a drive failing only special imaging hardware that DR firms buy may be able to get a complete image of the data. Just be aware the more you work with the drive the less likely a pro can recover it again I don't know the "value" of your data but you need to be "aware"
@Networks - Thank you for your time, patience, and effort. I truly do appreciate it.
@Rich -
AMD Phenom II X4 920
Asus M3N78-EM (went cheap, shame on me. I was in desperate need of a new computer at the time)
2x 2gb Kingston HyperX 1066mhz (this is what the RAM is rated for, but it runs at 800mhz since I have no desire, or the knowledge required to safely over-clock my system)
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 Zotac
C: Patriot Torqx TRB 32 SCSI Disk Device
D: ST310003 33AS SCSI
E: SAMSUNG HD204UI SCSI
F: WDC WD20 EADS-00R6B0 SCSI
GThe problem drive) Hitachi HDS723030ALA SCSI, which oddly enough is a 3tb but when I ran Belarc, it only shows up as a 800gb
Razor Lycosa
Razor Mamba
Power Supply is an Antec ATX12V V2.3 750watt
I should also mention that I have a Thermaltake Spedo (link is to the tigerdirect.com page for this product) and the 6 fans it comes with, as well as a after-market CPU fan, I can provide that information once I turn my computer off.
The only "playing" around I have done with the drive has been with the R-Studio scan and Recuva. Nothing else has touched this drive, as it cannot be accessed through Windows.
Recuva has shown files that have been transferred off of the drive in question in the past couple of weeks whose physical location on the drive has not been over-written with new data as of yet.
I did not. The files that showed up with Recuva were files that had been transferred off the drive already.
To me, it appears that the data is still on the drive, R-Studio seems to support this idea. Windows just refuses to access the drive without a format. Windows just flat out refuses to access the drive.
@Rich My apologies for not noticing your question under the quote. There were no other options for restoration points. My computer is definitely 100% virus free, I have never had a virus on any computer that only I access. I like to think I browse intelligently, but maybe I'm just lucky. Could the lack of restore points be due to the fact that my OS is on a 32gb HDD? Went cheap again, i just had to have a SSD for my OS.
I cannot click next unless I choose one of the restore points. Only one restore point shows up, even with the box checked. I can SS it if you would like. Thank you, Rich-M
System Restore is turned on, however it is only set to use 1% of my HDD, in this case, a whopping 320mb. Could it be this limitation that would delete any other system restores due to size restrictions? Unfortunately my C: drive is a 32mb SSD... =/
Since, you gentlemen have been so helpful, I figure I may as well clue you into steps that, hopefully, may be leading somewhere to resolve this issue.
I ran a chkdsk with the /f argument, following is what I have at this moment.
C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk G: /f
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is New Volume.
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
22784 file records processed.
File verification completed.
0 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
0 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
74 percent complete. (22740 of 24154 index entries processed)
It has hung there for about 10 minutes, Command Prompt is not showing up as Not Responding. Poking around the web for a bit tells me that this seems to be a common enough occurance and has convinced me to let it do its thing. One report was of this exact argument being used on a smaller drive taking several days.
Here's to hope. Once again, thank you for your efforts.
Ran chkdsk /f over night after it hung. Stupid me didn't even think about logging it, however when I woke up this morning, Command Prompt had a long list of over 10,000 recovered "orphan files."
Thank you for your help, I hope this helps some one else out who runs into a similar problem.
I agree. Unfortunately none of the data seems readable currently. I will be doing further tests to see if I can fix this. If I am able to fix it, I will post my results so that it may hopefully help some one else out in the future.
However, I will be buying a PCI RAID card and RAIDing everything up so I do not have this happen again, regardless of whether or not I am able to recover the data. I know this may not be the place, but are PCI RAID cards trustworthy and worth my time? Or should I just build a new system and run it as a home "server" for storage?
Any file system can become corrupted for many reasons. Raid doesn't solve failure but its an improvement such as raid5 min 3 drives. The best solution is to have regular backups so if/when this does happen you have good data to go back to.
Absolutely. I have an MCDBA which makes this whole thing fairly embarassing. I cannot thank you guys enough for your input on the situation. Other forumns are barely helpful and don't offer professional advice, as it seemed to be coming for you guys. Thank you once again.
Great why not mark this solved in the first post under "Thread Tools" in the first post.
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