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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Maxtor(Seagate) 500 GB External drive. Not readable.

April 5th, 2011, 2:00

Hi All,
One fine day my external hdd was stopped recognizing in the Win-XP machine, Steps that I did to correct
-> check the connection, tried in some other machine-- No result
-> Do some google , deleting the usb registry -- No result
-> I took it to a local market, However in the Bios it showed 0 MB,
-> this is when i realized that it could be a 0LBA error. I tied the http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807- ... 0011-hdds/
-> Bingoo !!!!, the drive started to be recognized in my Win -XP machine, I get the drive leter as well.

Now the problem is when i try to access the data , it says 'Not readable/damaged data' . The data is extremly important for me. Have stored all my pics,s/w, drivers, almost everything in there.
I tried the 'Seagate data recovery' and the data were accessible by the recovetry s/w. However the the trial version do not recover files that were more than 164Kb, Or say i get error saying the file is not recoverable in the trial mode. I cannot afford to but the s/w.
I have not tried the firmware update, fearing that may lead to loss of data. i would like to try the firmware update after i backup my data from the faulty disk.
Could some one please help me in retrieving the data first ,
and also want to know if i go for a firm ware -update, Will my disk will be running normally as in the past with the data still intact ?? how do i go about. Please note that mine is a IDE machine, though I have SATA , i havent tried it connecting the drive yet. Will do it.

Help much appreciated

Regards
Ujjal

Re: Maxtor(Seagate) 500 GB External drive. Not readable.

May 7th, 2011, 22:24

A firmware update on the drive will not give you access to the data. Seemd some sort of data corruption occurred. Find a free/something you can afford/ software to run a scan on your drive and extract the data.

Re: Maxtor(Seagate) 500 GB External drive. Not readable.

May 7th, 2011, 23:36

Before you try to do something for recovery your data, you must determinded what and/or where is problem: bad UBA and/or LBA, PLIST or GLIST error...

Re: Maxtor(Seagate) 500 GB External drive. Not readable.

May 8th, 2011, 0:55

Applying the 'internet fix' without knowing the cause that lead to 0 lba often cause this. Now maybe only a raw recovery... If the problem is not elsewhere (I think so from outcome and symptom). Good luck.
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