Solved: Secondary Hard Drive failure

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DrivetimeODrink

Secondary Hard Drive failure

Hi folks,

I have a second hard drive (E) which contains mostly work, films, mp3 etc. When booting up yesterday, the PC froze after the Windows XP startup screen (with the green progress meter thing). When I tried to boot up again, instead of freezing, I get the message "One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency." I let it do it, and it reports back "File record segment 36 is unreadable" and I let it go up to about 285.

I aborted the check, and got XP to load up. Drive E is visible in "My Computer", but it says "Drive E is not formatted, do you want to format it now?" I said no. I've tried a couple of times since, on one occasion it said "E is not accessible, the parameter is incorrect".

I can right-click the drive, and look at its properties, it says the file system is RAW (it isn't, it's NTFS), used space, free space and capacity are all 0 bytes.

I've phisically removed the hard disk and tried it on another PC, exactly the same results.

Any help here greatly appreciated... I've a hellova lot of stuff on that drive I need!

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Bartender_1🇨🇦

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mapledrums🇸🇬

Wow. This list sure is getting long boy :)

SOLUTION

Adrian Dobrota🇷🇴

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akleeds

I would normally try Norton Utilities to fix problems with partition headers etc. Failing that Ontrack's easy recovery is your best bet. You can download trial version which will scan the disk in a non-destructive way (best left running overnight on a big disk) and show you exactly what it can recover and the extent of damage on each file. To do the actual recovery you have pay for the licence but it is worth every penny!

mapledrums🇸🇬

Any luck ?

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Adrian Dobrota🇷🇴

DrivetimeODrink........please spare a moment and come back here to Experts-Exchange. We'd like to know if our answers helped you or not. If some answer helped you, please accept that as correct (or split points among experts that you consider helped you) in order to reward the expert(s) and close the question. Also, if it's not too difficult, please make a brief of problem and solution. That will help others solve similar problems just doing a google search.
If the problem wasn't solved please come back with questions or test results if you're still interested in that answer, and we'll try to figure it out; or post a 0 points question in community support asking for this Q to be deleted/PAQed.

*****PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT THIS AS ANSWER*********

Kronos

fosshaug

Thank You Bartender_1
You are a Hero.

I had the same problem as DrivetimeODrink and your solution to use PCInspector just now recovered 6000 digital images from my hard-drive.
I am forever thankful.

And of course thanks a lot to the creators of PCInspector that made this wonderful tool - and even for free!

Espen

fosshaug

Hi again

I was a bit hasty on the last message - PCInspector brought back all the files - apperantly.
But, they were all corrupted... Not a single file was readable.

So, I bought Winternals DisKCommander online - that did the trick. All files restored and healthy.

Espen

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Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. In addition to local storage devices like CD and DVD readers, hard drives and flash drives, solid state drives can hold enormous amounts of data in a very small device. Cloud services and other new forms of remote storage also add to the capacity of devices and their ability to access more data without building additional data storage into a device.