I have a Windows 7 computer.

I am having a problem with an SATA NTFS 2.5” hard drive that lives in an external USB case. It’s info is not appearing in “my computer”. When I try to open the drive I get a “cyclic redundancy error”. However, running “g: chkdsk /f /r” is possible as chkdsk seems to see the files. I have run that 3 times to no avail.

I installed jfilerecovery deluxe on my PC, selected the G: drive as the source and picked an appropriate destination folder on another drive. After choosing “start recovery” and waiting just a moment, I get a “please ensure that the source files are specified…” error. I cannot browse into the g: drive – that’s my problem!

What to do? Am I asking too much from this application? Or something else?

Steve

Running checkdisk was a bad move as it may have destroyed the drive's data structure.

First have to determine whether the drive (not the data) is damaged or not. Can use something like MHDD, preferably on a tower machine.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I neglected to mention that the drive has other volumes on it "D:, H:) that can be accessed as usual.

+1

test heads needed in this case

MHDD tells me it is not compatable with my version of windows I am running... Windows 7 home Premuim SP1, 64 bit.

Have to change settings in BIOS for legacy setting or similar. Read the manual.

It is DOS based software, which has nothing to do with Windows.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

OK, never mind. After struggling with and trying to grasp the concepts needed to use MHDD, I found and bought "File Scavenger" (at quetek.com) which found my CRC'ed volume and it's files, and is now in the 12 hour process of bailing me out. Hooray for a GUI application that "just works" for the likes of me.

Hope you will not run into other physical problems with the drive. 12 hours ouch!

Good luck

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I think the speed of the recovery is more of a network-speed issue than anything, but I am happy to just let that PC sit and work. As for that drive, I don't expect I will be using it any longer. In situations like this, is a thorough formatting enough to avoid problems in the future? As I said there are other volumes on the drive that are still OK. The drive started life as the C: drive in an HP laptop, and as such had a couple of small hidden volumes for recovery and such.

If there's ANY risk of this drive failing again in the future, I am happy to ditch it.

As labtech highlighted, you're taking a risk as your drive could deteriorate during that time. Perhaps it's just a "network speed problem" (we don't know your exact recovery equipment configuration, so cannot comment on your hypothesis), or perhaps this long anticipated recovery time is due to the failing drive killing itself performing lots of retries in the difficult-to-read areas, and a different approach would be less risky / more successful. In general, recovering data directly from a drive which has read problems (like yours), is not recommended. Just because recovery software allows that approach, does not mean that it is optimal / low risk.


Not necessarily. Insufficient info from the "problem drive" to give a detailed opinion, and without having the drive on the bench in front of someone, all anyone can give "remotely" via the forum, would be an opinion.


Just because the other volumes are readable now (at least enough for whatever testing you've done), does not mean that the drive isn't deteriorating.


Drive failure (in any of its variations) is always a possibility with ANY drive (as are other data-loss scenarios) - that's why having backups (even multiple & distributed backups for vital data) are essential for coping with drive-related problems. Good luck with your plan!