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.
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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.
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