I have a Maxtor 5400 RPM external hard drive. It was working fine and then I took it to work to share some stuff with my friends.

At work, on any system the drive wasn't accessible and the message I got was, the drive is not formatted. Just four hours ago it was working fine when connected at home.

I thought the USB case might have gotten screwed up so I brought it home, removed the drive from the case and hooked it up to my PC as a slave. No go. My system boot up became extremly slow. After boot up, the drive shows up in explorer, but when I clicked on the drive letter, this is what I got

http://img155.imageshack.us/my.php?image=drvinaccessiblesj9.jpg.

Checked Device manager, seems to be working fine.

Fired up Partition Magic (Even Magic took a long time to startup) and this is what I saw. .

http://img96.imageshack.us/my.php?image=partitionmagicsnapshot1pu7.jpg

The drive is J

From what I understood, the partition status is not active. Does it have to be active. How did this happen.

I have about 110 GB of stuff on this drive. Nothing life threatening, but stuff that is still important :O).

Please help in either troubleshooting my Drv or recovering the data.

jC

can't you just set it to active ?

Don't worry. With partition magic you can still browse in the partition even if it's hidden. Browse to it and copy all your data to another partition.

John :-))

I am afraid that if I change anything without checking, it might make my data completely unrecoverable.

I tried the file browser from partition magic, it didn't show me any files.

jC

No files? But J: is all coloured like it's 100 % full of data. Have you checked it for errors yet?

ok I used testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org). It showed me all the files and directories on that drive, which is a relief. Now how to get those back, that is the question.

Has anyone used this utility?

I used the Rebuild BS option in testdisk as in below:

hxxp://img116.imageshack.us/my.php?image=testdiskbootfi8.jpg'

My concern is what it says in there 'First sectors <boot code and partition information> are not identical.'

Anyway I used the Rebuild BS option and this is what I got.

hxxp://img54.imageshack.us/my.php?image=testdiskboot2om1.jpg

So should I go ahead and write the Boot secor to the drive? Will that cause any problems as it says that the 'Extrapolated boot sector and current boot sector are different.'

jC

What if you try ghost? Make an image. Put that image on another disk and try to access that.

:-)

Heyy I used the HDD regenerator found in Hiren's Boot CD 8.5 to recover the bad sectors on my drive and now I am able to see and access all the files on that drive.

Hope this info is useful for others too.

One question though. I use this drive mainly for storage and now that the bad sectors have been recovered, is it safe to use it for storage again or that I should just discard it?

jC

next time u get something like this happen..
just boot into the windows recovery consol and checkdsk /p
it should have repaired the issue with the unrecognised disk ... I have had to do this a couple of times for ppl or work.. not 100% really sure why it happens.. but i think it has a couple of reasons

I wouldn't trust that HD anymore. Once it has it first bad sectors it is a bad sign. A very bad sign.

John

definetly correct johnkeny , personally i would recover the partition like that to get my files and then get rid of the HDD.
wouldnt trust my data on it any more