Hi All,

I had a little accident today with my Buffalo external hard drive. While working at my desk at home I accidently knocked the drive with my arm and it fell on to the carpet. Now whenever I plug the drive into my laptop, I see it in Explorer as before, but when I click on it the laptop hour glasses, and eventually I get the message "The disk in drive E is not formatted. Do you want to format it?".

80% of the data on the drive has previously been backed up, but there are some recently moved files on it that I'd really like to recover.

I can't afford to give it in to a shop, and even if I could I would be some what concerned as the drive has files with personal information on them... so basically I need to know what my options are?... is there any software tool that can be used to recover the data, without the drive requiring handing in to a shop?

One thing my brother tried for me was to remove the drive from the Buffalo casing (which turned out to be surprisingly easy) and insert it into another external SATA drive casing... but still no luck... the drive continued to behave as if it needed formatting.

Anyway, I would appreciate some advise, even if it's just to say... "take it into the shop, else bin it!!"... in which case I will have to bin it (assuming a reformat doesn't work) as I really am concerned about all the personal and confidential data on the drive, plus it may be too expensive for me to have it repaired anyway.


Many thanks

Sharon

Your own advice is best. Your drive is mechanically damaged and there is no user repair.

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don't take it to a shop. take it to a professional lab. google 'data reocovery' and shop around. Most data recovery labs have strict data confidentiality and don't even look at the data as they have better things to do. Ensure you research whichever company you choose as some are better and more reliable than others.

Most offer a free evaluation so you can get a quote before you commit.

Other than that, its for the bin.

If ur options are get data back urself or bin it - then before binig ill sugest follwing.

Since ur drive is identified in BIOS and can even be seen in ur computer - get ur hands on a program called R-Studio , run it , select ur damaged drive in options and scan it. After scan is done look for the data u want to try to recover and grab it. If u need any clarifications on the process - ill check ur topic tommorow at work. Gl.

Ill add a little. Usualy a droped external drive while it spins will sustain a physical damage, head crash , bind spindle. But in this event it will click , or wont spin up at all. But u said that ur plug and play identifies it. And even assignes it a drive letter. So imo ull be fine.

Edit N3. If u are succesfull in retreiving ur data - copy it to another drive and use the droped one at ur own risk ( i would not use it at all TBH )

Hello Alexii,

With help from a friend we started a hard disk scan using the R-Studio program that you mentioned. However it's been running now for 14 hours and has got through only 400Mbytes of a 1TByte disk!!!... also, all I am seeing in the log section is the following message continuously scrolling...

"Read disk BUFFOLOExternal HDD as position <nnnnn> failed after 1 attempts. Data error (cyclic redundacy check)(23)"

...where <nnnnn> keeps increasing.

At this rate I suspect the thing will still be scanning this time next year!!

Although I guess if it ever manages to get pass the failed read attempts it will speed up?

One final point to mention, although the light on the external Buffalo drive casing is flashing (to indicate drive activity) I'm not hearing anything... even if I put my ear against the drive I detect no drive noise... it's a Western Digital drive and I usually hear it when it's being accessed, so I'm not sure if the scan is actually accessing the drive???... what do you think?

Thanks

Sharon

You are killing your disk.

Stop if you want to see the data again.

killing my disk???... in what way?... please elaborate.

trying to read a dropped hard drive using R Studio. You have a failing head or many unreadable sectors, the more you try to access these sectors the greater chance the head will crash and fail. Then you need serious money to recover the data.

R Studio is not designed for such a failure, you will need to send it to a lab to extract the data in a safe manner. The more you play, the greater its going to cost.

Is the data important?

Hello Sharon. What i think happened is when ur drive droped there was a mini head crash. And the plater surfaces developed N ammount of bad sectors due to physical damage. The information that was stored in the space where the bad sectors are now is all garbled up (and since u lost ur partition - MBR is damaged for sure ) , and when R-Studio is trying to access it - that information if failing the math test that confirms data integrity (CRC error ). Now in this event the scaning should speed up when it will pass the bads.
Second thing that slows down the scan is the fact that u are using USB enclosure. USB 2.0 is slower then IDE or SATA (dont know what is ur drive ). Now besided R-Studio there are a lot of different recovery programs. If u find R-Studio failing u , allow me to sugest File Scavanger, EASEUS, Recover My Files. Some might work where others fail. And when 1 needs 14h for the scan others can finish in 4h.

Other option is damaged read head(s). This is smth u will not be able to deal with urself, since u have to identify what read head(s) failed and use specialised software to image with that head turned off.

And unfortunatly HDD Spaz can be right. U might be killing the drive atm.

@ HDD Spaz.
Read the OP m8. It was stated DIY or bin it.

About the low noise it is usualy a good thing rather then bad. If u see the sectors keep reporting CRC errors that meens hdd is active.

Alexii you are giving bad advice. You may cause the data to be lost forever.

It obviously has some importance as she has gone to the trouble of finding this forum and buying data recovery software.

This might be recoverable for a small fee by a proper lab with the right equipment. Get a quote first then DIY the job!

@ HDD Spaz
I based my post on the DIY or bin it frame, like was stated by OP. Iv seen instances where a droped drive lost partition table and was almost fully and easily recovered with R-Studio.

@ Sharon

Another thing u can do is to run MHDD diagnostics program on that drive. And see if u have all ur bad sectors clustered toghether at the start of the drive or smth. In this event u can pin point when do bad sectors end (there will be a numerical value to the sector) and prompt R-Studio to start the scan from the point when they ended. I never tryed that meself though.

This happened to me and all that I needed to do was to connect the drive to a computer as a second internal drive, rather than as an external drive. Then it worked fine.

You can usually tell the pros from the newbie’s by looking at their post count. It’s not an accurate way to tell if someone is a pro but you can get a good idea of their skill level by previous posts. Personally I would second guess low post count users over ones with several hundred. Just my opinion. Good luck to you Sharon.

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