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I have a lot of photos and artwork I keep on my 200 GB external Hard drive.
Today, out of the blue, I get an error. It seems to turn on, light comes on, but when I click on the drive in Windows Explorer it is telling me the drive is not formatted would I like to format.
I have tried troubleshooting from the booklet, but curious if anyone else has had this issue and could point me an a good direction. (Maxtor site wasn’t a lot of help first time there)
Thanks
BarbI had a friend who’s primary hard drive on his computer crashed. He tried various tools to recover it, but none of them worked… until he used Gibson Research’s SpinRite. He was able to recover almost all of his files.
This could work on your drive, but the only possible catch is that it is a DOS application, so you might have trouble accessing the external drive via DOS (unless Maxtor has DOS drivers available for it… I’d check into that).
Hope this helps, and let me know how it goes.
P.S. – I moved this to the Computer Hardware forum. 😉
You can pull teh drive out of the external enclosure and put it into a computer as a standard IDE drive, though this will void the warranty on the disk.
If you want to do anything in DOS, you’ll need to find USB host drivers for your drive. I’ve accessed Maxtor external disks successfully before with Norton Ghost, though I don’t know what it actually put onto the floppy I used to boot up and restore data from the drive to the computer.
This is not likely a ‘crash’ though, it’s possible a check-disk would fix it. go to start -> run – > cmd, and run “CHKDSK X: /R” where X is your drive letter.
David & Jeff
Thanks for your input and help.
I tried to run checkdisk from Administrative Management and Computer Management >> Disk Management
Since there it didn’t say FAT or NTFS it wouldn’t read the drive. I did get as far as right clicking and choosing Properties and Tools, but it wouldn’t perform the error checking. David, do you think your method ( run – > cmd, and run “CHKDSK ) would be different?
I am learning as I go, but a lot seems over my head to recover this myself.
Hi
An update to my issue.
After sending it away to a tech, and trying the various items and many programs made especially for retrieving data, and even cracking open the case and putting it directly to another computer, they still can’t seem to get anything to ‘read’ my external hard drive.
The recommendation made to me was to reformat and to try and retrieve the data for me that way.
I have to tell you that is fairly scary.
I know that even the programs I ran myself when listing what kind of retrieval did I wish to perform, FORMATTED was listed, but it is still worrisome, and to me risky.
Any input?
Barb
The idea of formatting the disk to recover data is stupid. Formatting will clear the MFT, and write varias other data to the disk. I don’t see how having a blank MFT will help you recover anything. Perhaps try doing a RAW recover with GetDataBack NTFS?
I still think that removing the drive, putting it in a computer, and running SpinRite will be the best solution.
Jeff,
I couldn’t use that program, I didn’t understand what to do with it, and the tech wouldn’t try it, stating his company already purchased one that was as good or better. I did, David, ask him NOT to format the disk.Right now unfortunately it is in their hands over the holiday weekend, and I fear, next stop will be to an expensive specialist.
Thanks all, I will keep you posted.
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