I'm running Vista Home Premium and my secondary drive crashed. If I leave it hooked up to my pc it keeps it from booting up. Once I unplugged it, my system runs fine. I've got the Universal Drive Adapter from Newertechnology. I used it to hook up the drive via a usb port. However, it doesn't show up in Windows Explorer at all. When I check Device Manager I can see it there. However, the properties/volumes tab/status was blank or offline, I forgot to write it down.
I wonder if I'd do better with an external enclosure? Or is there a program that could find the drive when it's hooked up via the Universal Drive Adapter. Any suggestions? Yeah, I know, I shoulda backed up.
I checked the sticky above recovering data, but I don't think it covered this situation.
Depending on the symptoms there is a possibility that the USB adapter is the part that failed not the drive. If you are getting a lot of bad noises, that is probably the drive itself. But, if the computer is acting like nothing is plugged in at all, that could be the adapter.
Instead of trying an external enclosure, another USB to Sata adapter may be cheaper. Here is one for illustration: usb to sata or pata One that is sata or pata to usb only will be cheaper, DealExtreme is cheap if you can wait for the delivery. Again, if the drive itself has had a problem, this won't help.
jolma said: Depending on the symptoms there is a possibility that the USB adapter is the part that failed not the drive. If you are getting a lot of bad noises, that is probably the drive itself. But, if the computer is acting like nothing is plugged in at all, that could be the adapter.There are no noises coming from the hard drive. I can see the usb adapter and the HD in Device Manager/Disk Drives which would indicate to me that the computer sees it. When I bring up Properties/Volumes tab and populate it, the status is blank.
I'm thinking the USB adapter is working fine, but the drive is too far gone to be accessed, unless by a program like spinrite. Guess I have to decide if it's worth $89 to me to maybe get the data.
jangell2 said: ellory said: Its unlikely you will do better with an enclosure. You could try SpinRiteThat would cost me $89 and I wouldn't be sure it would work.There is a money back guarantee. And you do need to decide how much your data is worth
Spinrite can work on USB drives, but it looses a lot of the functionality. Its strength is that it works on the drive at the most basic levels, through the hardware, not the OS. The author recommends always attaching the drive directly to the motherboard and booting from the CD. Even if doing it from the USB connection works, you will still see additional benefits to running it from IDE or SATA connection.
BTW, I agree with the others that the USB connection is pretty suspect. I would definitely try connecting it directly to the system before I tried anything else. At least you will rule that out as a possability.
drodge said: Spinrite can work on USB drives, but it looses a lot of the functionality. Its strength is that it works on the drive at the most basic levels, through the hardware, not the OS. The author recommends always attaching the drive directly to the motherboard and booting from the CD. Even if doing it from the USB connection works, you will still see additional benefits to running it from IDE or SATA connection.When the secondary drive was attached to the motherboard it prevented my system from booting up. That was when I discovered the problem. Once it was disconnected, I was able to boot properly.
If I reattach it as a secondary drive, will Spinrite still be able to boot up from the CD? I guess the only way to answer that question is to do it.
BTW, when Spinrite boots up, does it give you choices of what drives to work on and what functions to do?
1. Make sure you put the CD first in the boot order 2. Its possible the electronics on your drive are so badly damaged that you won't be able to boot off any CD - even if its first in the boot order. You can try booting off your Windows install disk and see if that works 3. Make sure you have media to copy the recovered files off the damaged disk. If you get it back, you may only have one chance to get your date 4. Not sure of the hard drive choices - but I believe so. Check the videos on usage 5. SpinRite functions are all about the depth of the analysis to repair the drive. All the functions are nondestructive.
ellory said: 1. Make sure you put the CD first in the boot order 2. Its possible the electronics on your drive are so badly damaged that you won't be able to boot off any CD - even if its first in the boot order. You can try booting off your Windows install disk and see if that works 3. Make sure you have media to copy the recovered files off the damaged disk. If you get it back, you may only have one chance to get your date 4. Not sure of the hard drive choices - but I believe so. Check the videos on usage 5. SpinRite functions are all about the depth of the analysis to repair the drive. All the functions are nondestructive.As to point 3, would my bootable hard drive be available to copy to? Perhaps I should stick with my CD/DVD burner. I've got a spare external hard drive, I could copy to that.
I thought spinrite fixed the hard drive and made it usable. Of course, I'm thinking I should get the data off the bad drive ASAP and not use it anymore.
1. Your bootable drive will be available to copy to 2. Yes, you should get your data off the drive as soon as you can 3. Depending on the condition of the drive, SpinRite can fix it and make it usable. Or, not - depending on the nature of the failure. Safest to get your data off - and then, based on the nature of the recovery - you can decide whether you want to continue using it
When the drive is attached internally, does the BIOS detect the drive? You should also download & run the drive maker's diagnostic utility. Hopefully, we are not talking about anything physically wrong with the drive.
I was able to recently recover files from a partition Windows no longer recognized by using ESUS Data Recovery Wizard. I got the full for free from GiveawayoftheDay.com a while ago, but the demo version will scan and show the data it finds before you pay for the full version to recover it:
Note that DRW and most other recovery tools are read-only, and require writing the recovered data to a new/different drive. SpinRite isn't like other tools in that the damaged sectors it encounters it attempts to re-write to other sectors on the same drive. Some people think that this is a bad idea, since the rewrites may themselves become corrupted, causing SpinRite to enter a cycle of scan, re-write, scan, re-write, etc of the same data over various sectors, like the author of the blog below: http://www.myharddrivedied.com/weblog/why_spinrite_is_not_on_my_...
If you do use SpinRite, and it works, you should probably copy all of the data off of it in case it fails again.
FunnyStuff said: When the drive is attached internally, does the BIOS detect the drive? You should also download & run the drive maker's diagnostic utility. Hopefully, we are not talking about anything physically wrong with the drive.I'm not sure. When it was attached internally it would prevent the system from booting up. I didn't notice if it was recognized during the bootup. Unless the drive maker's (seagate) utility could be run from a bootable CD, it wouldn't do me any good.
Say I run spinrite and it fixes (at least temporarily) the bad drive, do I copy the data there while in spinrite's DOS system, or bootup Windows and do it then?
System does not need to boot to Windows to see if the BIOS detects the drive. Just enter the BIOS setup by hitting the DELETE key or whatever key the motherboard uses. If the drive is detected, you will see the drive listed.
All the drive makers have diagnostic utilites can boot on their own. Seagate's program is called SeaTools for DOS.
FunnyStuff said: System does not need to boot to Windows to see if the BIOS detects the drive. Just enter the BIOS setup by hitting the DELETE key or whatever key the motherboard uses. If the drive is detected, you will see the drive listed.
All the drive makers have diagnostic utilites can boot on their own. Seagate's program is called SeaTools for DOS.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/I downloaded SeaTools for DOS twice and burned it twice. Both discs produced an error of "InitDiskError readingpartition tabledrive 01 sector 0" each time I booted up with SeaTools. The second time I unhooked the bad HD just to be sure it wasn't complaining about it. I presume the error referred to the CD I burned. I've not been having problems burning discs and I've burned images before using roxio.
Next step is to go into the bios with the bad HD hooked up.
jangell2 said: Both discs produced an error of "InitDiskError readingpartition tabledrive 01 sector 0" each time I booted up with SeaTools. drive 01 should be your secondary drive so this error probably means that SeaTools was having trouble reading the bad drive. I'm surprised that stopped it from running though.
minidrag said: jangell2 said: Both discs produced an error of "InitDiskError readingpartition tabledrive 01 sector 0" each time I booted up with SeaTools. drive 01 should be your secondary drive so this error probably means that SeaTools was having trouble reading the bad drive. I'm surprised that stopped it from running though.Hmmm. Does SeaTools automatically start looking at the drives? I thought I was supposed to get a menu allowing me to choose the drive?
The full message was "InitDiskError readingpartition tabledrive 01 sector 0" repeat this two more times than "Press F8 to trace or F5 to skip CONFIG.SY get FATblock failed: 0x000000e8 Invlaid Opcode at" then a long address was given.
I would let this sit for 3-5 minutes and then power off. I guess I don't know for sure that SeaTools had ceased operation.
It should boot up to a GUI type menu that lets you choose the drive. Sounds like you aren't getting that far. Maybe boot it without the bad drive so you can see how it should work?
jolma
Senior Member
posted: Oct. 18, 2009 @ 8:27p
The seatools CD may not be working out right, UBCD also includes seatools, you could try that instead: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ Seatools is under Hard Disk Tools, Hard Disk Diagnostic Tools.
minidrag said: It should boot up to a GUI type menu that lets you choose the drive. Sounds like you aren't getting that far. Maybe boot it without the bad drive so you can see how it should work?I did that the second time and got the same error message.
From Seagate's forum, it seems like there have been some complaints about the SeaTools program crashing and thus being unreliable. Since the drive is at least being seen in the BIOS, you hopefully should be able to recover something from the drive. You could always try ***cough***Hiren'sBootCD***cough***. Use the program with the initials GfN 4.0. You point to the drive in GfN and let it scan (for hours). When it is done, it will give you an index of what it can recover. Save this index file so you do not need to rescan in case there is an interuption or crash at some point. You would also need some empty space on another drive for GfN to copy what if finds. If the application does recover your data, I am sure the company would appreciate you purchasing the program.
The problem with a lot of recovery tools is they pound the drive trying to recover the bad areas and that can cause the drive to fail before you get all your data much of which may be easily recoverable. The safest way to recover data asuming you don't want to pay for a professional is to use ddrescue not be be confused with dd_rescue. http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue which is included on the Ubuntu Rescue Remix CD (http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/). The advantage of ddrescue is that one, it will NOT write to the damaged drive which as others have posted is a real limiation with spinright (but of course you need another drive at least as big to copy to) and two it will skip over the bad sectors on the drive and not try to immedately recover them. The advantage of this is you get all the intact data that is easily recovered first and then can run ddrescue a second time to have it attempt to recovery the bad sectors (which is harder on the drive and can cause it to fail). The problem with ddrescue and I have used it quite sucessfully in the past is that it really requires a knowledge of linux. It creates a DD image of the hard drive and you have to know how to manipulate those to get your data back. Also if you need to do file carving (http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/File_Carving) PhototRec is an excellent tool for that (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec).
Also you should NEVER try to recovery over USB. Always connect the drive to the IDE/SATA interface if at all possible this applies to all recovery tools. Essentailly there are certain commands and infromation available to the recovery tools only if the drive is connected via its native interface.
Also keep in mind with a failing drive any action you take can make the problem worse. If you really want the data and are willing to pay do that first and take it to a professional otherwise be aware that each action you take is probably reducing your chance of recovery.
Also some obvious questions is drive spinning up, is it recognized in the bios and is it making any funny noises like a repeating, click, click, click. If the drive is not spinning up or is not recognized in the BIOS (assuming your MOBO and power are ok) you could have a hardware problem and no software spinrite, ddrescue or anything else other than swapping parts on the drive is going to help you.
Put the drive in a good USB or Firewire enclosure and hook it up to a Mac. Mac OS can read FAT and FAT32 partitions, and it can read (but not write) to an NTFS partition (which I assume is how it is formatted), so at least you can get the files you need off of it if the drive looks good to the Mac. Be sure you hit Cancel if you get a message like "Disk or drive not recognized" or "Drive needs to be initialized" which to me would mean that the partition table is corrupt or the drive needs to be formatted. If you get a message about wanting to the drive with Time Machine then at least it looks a good drive to the Mac. Good luck.
soundxli said: Put the drive in a good USB or Firewire enclosure and hook it up to a Mac. Mac OS can read FAT and FAT32 partitions, and it can read (but not write) to an NTFS partition (which I assume is how it is formatted), so at least you can get the files you need off of it if the drive looks good to the Mac. Be sure you hit Cancel if you get a message like "Disk or drive not recognized" or "Drive needs to be initialized" which to me would mean that the partition table is corrupt or the drive needs to be formatted. If you get a message about wanting to the drive with Time Machine then at least it looks a good drive to the Mac. Good luck.
As a warning if it is not obvious be sure not to enable time machine on the drive or it will overwrite ALL your data. My friends in the data recovery business say they get serveral of these "time machine" recoveries a week these days.
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