Hi all,

Its just not my year, second hard drive to die on me . I have a zalman ve200 usb enclosure with a wd 500gb sata hard drive in it. Now its been working fine, no problems at all but just recently when I had the usb enclosure plugged in and switched to iso mode (it was previously in normal hard disk mode, restarted my pc, it came up with the error 1st partition EE.

Looking on zalman faq is not very helpful, saying to create a new volume.
http://www.zalman.com/eng/product/FaqVi ... VE200%20SE

I took it out the case, and with my usb to sata cable and power pack connected it to my windows computer. It says to initilaize it with the space showing up as unallocated. I didnt want to do this as unsure what would happened.

I'm sure the data is fine on it, is this something with the mbr or something being messed up? Will I be able to get my files back?

Any ideas, suggestions welcome.

Thanks

Can you see your files with Partition Find and Mount?

http://findandmount.com

If so, first back them up and we can then set about rebuilding your original MBR and partition table.

To this end I would suggest a disc editor such as DMDE (freeware).

http://dmde.com

Can you show us DMDE's partitions report?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I tried ZAR and after about 10% through a scan it found a number of 5110mb NTFS partitions and a few fat32. all of which too small, at the top under the name of the drive it found unknown 465gb which looks right, but opon a file scan it found my folders and files, but many were missing. Should I of waited for it to do a full scan?

Tried using file and mount, just seems to freeze when I start a scan with nothing happening. Running DMDE The first screen shows this.

Physical Drive 3 [500 GB] GPT [4K] 500 GB [ T ] LBA: 0 - 122 096 645
GPT (EE) 500 GB [ E!x!x ] LBA: 6 - 122 096 640
found GPT 500 GB [ C ] LBA: 6 - 122 096 640
found GPT 500 GB [ C ] LBA: 6 - 122 096 640
unallocated 500 GB [ ] LBA: 6 - 122 096 640
$Noname 03 found FAT [512] 41.1 MB [ B ] LBA: 7::3584 - 10 040::2560
Zalman found NTFS [512] 500 GB [ B C F ] LBA: 256 - 122 096 383
Basic data partition found Data 4.00 TB [ E ] LBA: 2 048 - !976 771 071
$Volume 02 found NTFS [512] 500 GB [ x C x x] LBA: 33 024 - 122 096 639

If this is not what you need let me know. The ZALMAN partition looks about right, i think. Not sure what those letters mean after it.
Really appreciate your help

Thanks

The external enclosure appears to be configured with a 4KB sector size.

122 096 646 x 4096 bytes = 500.1 gigabytes

http://www.google.com/search?q=12209664 ... ytes+in+GB

When you remove such a drive from its enclosure, you expose its native 512e sector size. Your OS now sees a "4KB file system" on a 512e physical drive. That's why it can't make sense of it. Inside the enclosure the drive appears as a USB mass storage device with a 4KB sector size, so the OS sees a "4KB file system" on a 4KB physical drive.

So the first thing you need to do is to reinstall the drive in its original enclosure. In DMDE you would then double-click the "Zalman" partition and hope that you can see your files and folders. If so, then we can begin restoring the original partition table.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks again for the reply. I'll give it a go in the zalman enclosure but If I remember rightly it wouldn't show up at all as the zalman case seems to be stuck in ISO mode displaying an error. I'll try again and report back. Going off memory, I think I formatted it with a higher allocation unit size than 4k. Would the sector size still be 512, are they different things?

Also one more thing to mention, I may of initially formatted the drive in another enclosure, and then transferred it from that to the Zalman case. Would that effect things? It seemed to work fine in the zalman case so didn't think anything of it.

Ok, so I put it in the original caddy that I did the formatting in. The zalman did not work at all, still showing as optical drive. Success! Volume opened and proceeding to recover files to another hard drive. Seems like it will take a long time, going very slow so will leave it over night. Awesome program (DMDE).

Do you know if there is a way to confirm the integrity of the files, like md5 or something. I'd rather not have to open each file manually to check they are ok?

I found options about reconstruction and virtual file systems, would these help?