So... today my external HDD containing 80% of my Japanese media decides to render itself unreadable. Maybe it was kinda dying slowly and thats why it munched my KO deck short while ago? Yeah, luckily I have a back up of my KO deck so i'm safe on that front... and i've got a dorama, 2 anime and a few movies on C: that are all good. But I had all my music and like 20 whole anime on the other drive.

The problem is this, when I go into my computer instead of coming up with info on how much space is left its just blank and if I click on it to open it it tells me I need to format it to use it. If I view properties it looks completely blank with 0bytes free and 0bytes used.

I don't know what happened.

Anyone have any suggestions? I mean im not completely freaking cos all my music is still on my phone but I had tv shows on there too! and it'd be nice if there were some way to recover a bit of it it at least.

hitachi drive fitness test

mafried: Isn't that a hardware test and as such will do nothing to fix his problem? If his harddrive is spinning up and showing itself to the OS but not showing data, then at most there is an intermittent corruption issue (either from system hardware or a virus) which probably messed up the partition map or the filesystem. The drive itself isn't dead and most of the data is probably recoverable.

Without buying any third party software I think scandisk is all there is for Windows. Try running it at the most detailed scan setting.

If all else fails, format it and run a data recovery program such as GetDataBack. The trial version doesn't let you back anything up so by this very sentence you know what i'm suggesting here.

If you format your drive only very few files will be corrupt. Ones near the head of the disk, everything else should be fine I think.

Woah!

DO NOT FORMAT a damaged drive. DO NOT "FIX" a damaged drive.

Don't do either of these things until you have your data. Formatting/fixing can easily make things much, much worse.

The correct way to get data off a damaged drive is something called "drive imaging." On Linux, that would be with a program like "ddrescue." Unfortunately, I have no idea what you would use on Windows--probably some expensive commercial software. In any case, you need a lot of free disk space to make that work: a new drive and borrow the use of a working drive thats bigger than the original.

Realistically, your best option is to go to a local data recovery shop.

Fixing a drive can make things worse, or it can.. fix the drive.

In any case, it's worth the risk instead of spending a few hundred dollars on pro recovery or another empty hdd just for some anime vids.

You should try getdataback first if you have another empty drive. I used it once or twice on camera memory cards (Sony thinks it's a great idea to erase the file table when you mount your camera and then write it back when you eject. If you don't eject cleanly due to battery cutting out, computer crashing, etc, then your data is gone. Yet another reason I'll never buy Sony crap now)

*counts losses and moves on*

mezbup Wrote:*counts losses and moves on*

Try getting two harddrives. Raid them up. Then you have backup if on fails. Unless they fail at the same time.... because you puter was throw out a window.... by your girlfriend.... because you were playing too much WoW.... >_>

ropsta Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:*counts losses and moves on*

Try getting two harddrives. Raid them up. Then you have backup if on fails. Unless they fail at the same time.... because you puter was throw out a window.... by your girlfriend.... because you were playing too much WoW.... >_>

Good gf, at least she cares about your well being

liosama Wrote:

ropsta Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:*counts losses and moves on*

Try getting two harddrives. Raid them up. Then you have backup if on fails. Unless they fail at the same time.... because you puter was throw out a window.... by your girlfriend.... because you were playing too much WoW.... >_>

Good gf, at least she cares about your well being

Indeed she does. WoW is the scum of the cyberverse.

wildweathel Wrote:DO NOT FORMAT a damaged drive. DO NOT "FIX" a damaged drive.

Don't do either of these things until you have your data. Formatting/fixing can easily make things much, much worse

I totally agree with wildweathel. DO NOT TRY TO FIX THE DRIVE.

USE EasyRecovery from Ontrack to back up your files to another drive.

http://flmsdown.net/2007/09/15/easy_reco...guage.html

spinrite, not free but it works >>

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm