External SATA Hard Drive - Recovery

I was using my Acer AO 532h - with Windows 7 Starter - to do a back up of a 500GB external hard drive. This source drive was an Iomega (aka Jmicron aka Seagate) 500GB 2.5 in. SATA drive. It held the backup files for the Acer internal hard-drive (this latter had also gone u/s just recently - hence trying to do a backup of the backups). The destination drive was a Toshiba 500GB external drive.

I used Windows (with TeraCopy) to do the transfer. It got as far as four folders (out of hundreds) when it suddenly dropped the transfer rate from MB/s down to KB/s. Then it just stopped. I thought that it was due to a lose connection - the source drive case had a mini USB connection (non-spec.). And the flickering blue light went out. I checked the last few folders and they were empty. I thought that the drive had failed. I now reckon it was the drive's mother board.

I bought a new case for the failed drive from Maplin - it came with a normal USB to normal USB cable - better connections than mini or micro USB. However when I mounted the SATA drive in this whilst I got a winking blue light but again no drive letter was allocated and the Acer could not see the source drive (in new case) to transfer any files.

Using Windows Disk Management I found that the duff drive was viable but no letter had been allocated to it; and that all of the space on it - 465.76GB - had become 'unallocated.' The description said the drive was 'Not Initialised.'

However it is full of files - its just that they seem to have become unindexed. This leads me to believe that the index file has become corrupt - I suspect due to the lose connection with the mini USB socket. The disk appears to spin OK so the head and platters appear to be OK. So this implies that this is a software problem.

But how do I re-index the files, in order to copy them across to the destination drive?

Many thanks.

 

Drive recovery is tricky, you could use a partition manager to either , copy over
each partition to a new drive in the hope that you can read the partitions one by one, or assign a drive letter to each partition this last suggestion could prove troublesome if the drive in unallocated .


Also you could download a drive recovery program from freewarefiles.com

 

Thank you for the ideas. I will try them out at the weekend.

The main problem is that some tools do not work because they all expect the duff drive to be allocated a drive letter. But this doesn't happen. Sporadically it is allocated D: but this soon disappears.

So fare I have tried Wondershare Data Recovery (actually paid for this), Recuva, iCare, Remo, Yodot, TestDosk, Seagate Tools, Seagate Recovery Suite.

I wanted to use TestDisk but it is a command driven app. and I can't use the up / down cursor keys to select the drive to be tested.

And Seagate Recovery Suite wont even start up.

Oh - and the data recovery firms in London want £500 for recovery!!!!

 

The drive is full of files. I know that. However all scanning state that it is not initialised, and all sectors are unallocated. My assumptions are that the files are there but have become unindexed, or the partition(s) in which the data lies has been lost, that the files are there is raw data form.

So in my major dilemmas for their recovery are:

1/ do I simply do a deep scan and recover the raw data found (if any)

2/ do I re-initialise the drive first, then attempt to recover the files using deep scanning for raw data

3/ do I re-format the drive first, then attempt to recover the files using deep scanning for raw data

4/ do I re-partition the drive first, then attempt to recover the files using deep scanning for raw data

or any combination of the above. Thank you.

 

Tricky question to answer as I have never had to recover a drive.

You could possibly copy over one partition to a eternal drive or
flash drive then try ot recover it from there.

 

Anytime if you have some error from hard drive, you need backup the data.If the data had been lost. Download Data recovery software to get back