250 Gig Door-Stop

[jk3210]

Well it looks like my 250 Gig Maxtor just became a door-stop.

"Can't access drive. File system is corrupted."

It spins-up fine, so I'm wondering what the data recovery guys use to access a drive in this situation?

[kaled]

Is this your primary (boot) disk or merely a (secondary) data disk?

Kaled.

[jk3210]

Secondary drive. External, also. It has 6 years worth of photos/graphics on it. Nice, huh?

[moltar]

You can try to send it to numerous recovery services offered all over the net. Some of them charge in 4 digit ranges. If the data is really important and you have cash to spare, almost all digital failures can be fixed by replacing the internal boards/motors/whatever.

I doubt that the storage disk itself failed. That usually happens when you drop it, put water on it or anything else physical. If it was just sitting there and all of a sudden stoped working, it's most likely an internal board failure and can be fixed.

[jk3210]

Strange occurance. I was just starting to un-zip a 4 gig logfile to an external drive and the process froze. After that I couldn't access the external drive in the Windows Explorer --it would just sit there, then time-out.

Did a re-start and ScanDisk popped up and did its thing, then the start-up completed. When I tried to access the drive, I got the error message "File System Corrupted," (or something close to that).

I talked to the local data recovery guys and they said that they could get the data off the drive for min.$2000, but I got the impression from them that all I need is one of those really low-level programs that sees everything on a disk, so I could either copy the important stuff myself or delete the TEMP DIR I was working in that might be causing the problem.

Can anyone recommend a good low-level program for this?

<added:> The drive spins fine, so it appears to me that it's only a corrupted file system, not the drive itself.

[Philosopher]

can't give you a recommendation off hand, but I just did a quick search for data recovery software and it brought up a number of programs and all of them I looked at had a demo that would let you see what it can recover.

Try them out, if it shows it can get the stuff, buy it, if not, try the next one. ;)

[jk3210]

Yes, thanks, that's just what I've been doing right now. The initial scan is taking an hour+.

[Philosopher]

Keep us updated. If you find a prog that seems to work well, sticky me. It's always good to have a plan. ;)

[jk3210]

Tested the first program on my internal HD, then re-connected the faulty external HD and re-ran the program.

Program freezes when it first scans for drives. Trying a second program now.

[jk3210]

Tried 4 programs with no luck. The guys from India gave it the best shot, but nothing will read the drive. Too corrupted.

Guess I better clear my calendar for the next few months.

[Philosopher]

did you try x-ways.net?

They seem to offer a few different products from the more technical hex editor based version to easier to use ones.

[jk3210]

Bartender, SET'EM UP!

After trying 4 separate programs and talking to two data recovery guys, it was lowly old [chkdsk G: /f] that was finally able to convert the corrupted /temp1 dir to a file (which I immediately smoked) and the drive came back!

DRINKS ON THE HOUSE!

Thanks very much for the help, folks.

(...and can anyone recommend a good RAID? <G> )

[lammert]

A RAID configuration probably doesn't help against FAT corruption as the corruption may spread over both disks simultaneously.

I have had two instances of the problem described by you and in both cases RAID wouldn't have been of any help IMO. In one instance a disk defragmentation program stopped halfway, in the other instance the power went off during a program installation.

I repaired both problems in a not really conventional way, I mounted the disk as a partition under Linux (there is a FAT32 driver under Linux) and accessed it from there. In one case I removed the damaged directory tree, in the other case I moved the healthy new files to another disk and reinstalled my latest Ghost image of the disk.

[jk3210]

So how does one protect his data against FAT corruption?

[vite_rts]

you don't, you buy a very good back up system an backup to separate media regularly

[jk3210]

...reading WebmasterWorld archives now.