I have never, ever seen a hard drive do this...

[PushHands]

I purchased a Western Digital 250gb hard drive, brand spanking new at a retailer, not OEM. Came with the full box, instructions, IDE cables and everything. I have historically purchased OEM for myself but since this was for a friend, I knew he'd be more comfortable if the HD came from a retailer.

My external HD is the exact same which was purchased over a year ago and has been running strong. I've never had a HD go out on me personally but I know from being in support in the past that it does happen.

This is exactly why this HD problem has me stumped. In my years of experince with hardware and specially HDs, I've never seen nor heard of this problem before. Here is the situation:

Installed new HD for my friend earlier this year. Last week I get a call from him that the HD is no longer accessible and that everything he clicks on it, it asks if you want to reformat it. I confirm this after driving down there and checking everything out, jumpers, IDE cables, and even installed in on my system and reproduce the same problem. If I "right click" and select "properties," I get
this.
The computer manager shows that the hard drive is fine.

I suspect that its a virus problem as he's an older gentleman that will be forever using AOL DSL with Internet Explorer without a firewall. All of his files reside on this HD so I need to get at the data. This situation has open his eyes and have begun listening to me to secure his system down. But hindsight is 20/20 of course.

What do you guys think of this HD? Has anyone seen this before?

 

[aatf510]

Have you tried reformating + repartitioning the HD yet?

 

[MobiusPizza]

Other then virus I think of nothing else.

Did "chkdsk e: /f" work on the drive?

 

[PushHands]

I could format the HD but I first need the data from it. I just discovered this program "Recover My Files" in order to extract the data off the drive. I haven't "chkdsk e:/f" yet. What does that do actually as I've done it before when requested by the OS but never really truly understood it.

 

[iman00b]

I also have a similar problem, did "Recover My Files" work for you? I tested virtuallab demo and it seems to be able to read off of the drive so i think i may be able to recover.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Originally posted by: PushHands
I could format the HD but I first need the data from it. I just discovered this program "Recover My Files" in order to extract the data off the drive. I haven't "chkdsk e:/f" yet. What does that do actually as I've done it before when requested by the OS but never really truly understood it.

chksdk.exe is a program that checks the file structure of a HDD. It verifies the file allocation table, fix references and indexes, check integrity of the file system, etc.

Don't underestimate the usefulness of this tool.
I've been using external HDDs. Everytime I unplugged the HDD accidentally when it's transferring files; the contents in the HDD all disappeared. It's chkdsk.exe which fixes the corrupted table and I get my stuff back.
==

In your case I would suggest running chkdsk. It doesn't hurt anyway, it won't mess your files up. Also I strongly suggest doing a virus check after that.

 

[PushHands]

Thanks for the information about chkdsk.exe as I didn't know it could do all that. I'll definitely use it in the future as it wouldn't work on the hard drive in question because it is seen as a "raw" drive.

RecoverMyFiles seems to be working and I'll give a full report when I'm done. But this doesn't mean I'm not open to further suggestions as who knows what RecoverMyFiles will do

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Don't run anything that does ANYTHING to the Hard drive. Do not do chkdsk, whatever. Get a fresh new HD thats larger. Get a program like GetDataBack, and copy everything ASAP. If you lose integrity, too bad. Unless there are better programs out there, you're pretty much set. You might have the directory integrity or whatever. I had like 98% recovery success with one of my drives. I'd like to say 100%, but I'm sure there were some errors. However, I noticed nothing. I could still run MoH:AA from the recovered drive, so I guess itw as all good. My other HD that I had to recover lost all directory structure. I got a bunch of random folders with random files in there. Recovered most of what Iw anted.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Chkdsk doesn't ever overwrite the data sectors and is very safe to use. The only thing it ever does is fix damaged file allocation tables; which this feature I have every success whenever I use it.

 

[kentucky]

Something kinda similiar happened to me a while back. I installed the bad drive as a slave on my computer and used the ERD Commander from the Winternals pack to recover my data. It seems to be very accurate recovery software, not really inituitive but reliable.

 

[PushHands]

The problem with the program RecoverMyFiles is that it doesn't retain the orignal file names nor the original folder structure as you would see it in Explorer. For a jpg file, it begins with something like recoveredpic1.jpg, recoverpic2.jpg, and on until the last jpg file is name recoverpic302.jpg.

Though I can extra the data, its all sorted into one folder and I would have to reorganize everything. Something my friend isn't willing to do and he said to scrap it if it came to that. He's asked me to get some quotes from data extraction companies so we'll see.

GetDataBack looks promising and it seems to keep the recovered file names and folder structure, but its quite a bit. I'm pretty sure he would purchase it but for $80, I'd have to make sure it can extract the data (which I'm sure it will) and that it will keep the original file name and folder structure.