OK, so roughly a year ago I had the entire first year of my son's life in pictures/video stored electronically. I had the data on a WesternDigital "MyBook" external hard drive that was connected to my PC via usb. The drive was less than 6 months old and had worked just fine; no anomalies whatsoever.
Then, all of a sudden and for reasons that I cannot figure out, the drive wouldn't mount on my PC (XPpro / SP2 at the time). The drive spins and mechanically seems fine. No clicks, scrapes, coughs, or wheezes. However, the drive volume won't mount on Windows and is not viewable in "Disk Manager". I bought Lsoft's file recovery enterprise, which is supposed to recover lost partitions and other files; as long as the sector's haven't been overwritten.
Lsoft's file recovery couldn't see the drive. I used their boot cd option to boot into a Vista PE environment and still could not see the drive.
I have done nothing else to it since I recognize my own Data Recovery ignorance.
I am broke and refuse to pay too much $$$ for expert data recovery. I think that this is a logical problem on the drive and that I simply am not "up to speed enough" to fix it…. yet.
I have read that, due to USB data limitations, hard drive SMART and other diag data doesn't get reported over USB connection and often this can hinder data recovery.
As an IT / InfoSec student, I have temporarily acquired a copy of EnCase Forensics software v5 to familiarize myself with (legit copy in accordance with a school curriculum). I've taken the problem hard drive out of its external case and am about to install it into my PC along with a separate blank 500GB drive. Then I hope to use EnCase for drive-to-drive acquisition and work off of the copy; leaving the original problem drive undisturbed.
I know that if I screw this up I may ruin any chances of data recovery. With this in mind, I wanted to check and see if there's anyone out there with expertise in this area of work.
Can anyone please help me to find a better way, or to help guide my actions? It would be greatly appreciated.
Does anyone know why an external drive suddenly won't mount in the Windows OS?
Does the USB connection hinder telemetry data transmission; resulting in diminished ability to get to data on a troubled drive?
I have SpinRite, though, have read that depending on the problem it could make the situation worse. SpinRite doesn't see the drive either anyway.
What happens when you open My Computer and right click on the external Drive that is giving you stress?
I have a very similar set up to you with an External Removeable Hard Drive which for me is my Ghost 12 backup drive E:\ - No actual problems with it, but did have USB connection problems with my Mouse and Digital Camera not being recognised when respective cable connections to USB ports by either recently. I downloaded USBDView.exe and followed the instructions on the website included along with completely turning off my system, unplugging it from the wall, and unplugging the two troublesome hardware cables to the respective USB ports. I waited for about 10 minutes to completely degauss the system.
Degauss your monitor by turning it off completely and back on, every 5 days
Completely turn off' your machine every 5 Days. This is different than re-starting
I then plugged all cables into their respective USB ports, rebooted and found that the problem was then resolved after the system was up and running again.
Regarding recovering data from any Hard Drive, this software called Recuva is very good, I can recommend it as I have helped several members on forums by giving them the software to final success. I realise your system has to see your Hard Drive for you to do anything, but am including the link if ever you should need it.
Good luck with your lessons, and do let us know if the above helped at all.
What happens when you open My Computer and right click on the external Drive that is giving you stress?
it doesn't appear in my computer. Explorer doesn't show it at all. if i remember correctly, at the time it was noted as a mass storage device when i would click on the "remove hardware" icon in my task bar notification area; it's the icon you would click on to "safely remove" hardware.
then, when i went into "Administrative Tools" -> "Computer Management" -> "Disk Management", the drive didn't show up there either.
I had something like this happen with an external dvd-rw drive once to. that was an aptiva model and i ended up pitching it.
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I'm going to check out the USBDview link that you recommended. thank you for this app info. i can't count how many times usb devices haven't shown up and i have to assign other drive letters. the usbdview will go in my toolbox.
this may also offer some ability for me to get data or at least clues as to what went wrong. i know that when one puts a hard drive on windows machine, windows overwrites some of the area with desktop.ini and recycler. i'm just a little too paranoid to hook the original drive up and rather want to work off of a bit-by-bit copy.
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thanks for the recuva link. that won't help with my case, though, as it's not a file pointer issue. the recova appears to be good for when the file pointer has been wiped yet the file, and identifying header information that is part of it, is still the data in the sectors. meaning that the data is still there but the pointer to the file location on disk is wiped.
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i'll try the degaussing/power-down ops as well. what's the difference between restart and full shutdown? i know there's difference still but most people i ask say there's no difference.
i'll post if any of the above works and also what, if anything, i learn from this whole endeavor.
Sad to say, but external USB drive enclosures are often short lived. The most likely cause of the problem is an electronics failure in the enclosure itself. I had this happen on two different external USB enclosures, the light weight, aluminum kind that did not have any kind of cooling. In both cases, the hard drive itself was okay.
The first one died in less than two months. I purchased a different make of enclosure, though of similar design and moved the hard drive from the old enclosure to the new one. When that one died after 4 months, I purchased a more expensive enclosure that has a built in cooling fan and again moved the drive from the old enclosure to the new one. It's been working flawlessly now for over a year.
You have a couple options. The easiest and cheapest would be to remove the hard drive from the enclosure and mount it as a slave drive in your computer. If the drive is good, you will be able to access your data. Immediately back it up to as manay DVDs as necessary as that kind of data is priceless.
Once you've done that, buy a good USB 2.0 external enclosure with a fan and mount the drive there.
I waited for about 10 minutes to completely degauss the system.
Degauss your monitor by turning it off completely and back on, every 5 days
Completely turn off' your machine every 5 Days. This is different than in re-starting
what's the difference between restart and full shutdown? i know there's difference still but most people i ask say there's no difference.
I think I answered that in my first reply as above in quotes. Maybe someone else has a more detailed explanation regarding the difference.
regards,
When you restart the machine turns right back on, when you shut down the machine is turned off.
A restart and shut down both still have power going to the mother board to prevent power surges that occur when you first power up a board.
My experience with hard drive enclosures is the same as Ztuckers, except I was not smart enough to buy an enclosure that is cooled. (I just put the drive in my machine as a secondary)
well today i set aside the whole day to work on this. still am at a loss. Here's what I've done today. Thank you for the information and please keep any and all knowledge/suggestions coming. I appreciate it.
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BTW - The troubled sata hard drive in question is a:
WesternDigital 500GB
WD5000AACS
Caviar SE16
"Green Power"-type
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I installed the drive directly into the pc and booted;
the pc froze during boot. it froze on the portion of POST where the hard drives are detected. All I see on the screen in the "Gateway" symbol in the center and "F2 for setup" and "F10 for boot list" in the lower-right corner of the screen. Then the screen just stays there and my pc's activity light stops blinking (activity light is in off state and not solid on state). I couldn't even get into BIOS setup when I did hit F2.
powered down machine and unplugged A/C power
I then disconnected the SATA data and power cables from the trouble-drive
booted pc and hit F2 to go into set up. did not freeze pc this time and entered BIOS setup just fine.
In my BIOS I set the drive-mode from AHCI to Legacy and also set the BIOS to automatic drive detection.
reconnected SATA data & power cables to the trouble-drive and powered on. Same as before, system freezes during POST at the "Gateway" splash screen.
Power down, disconnect pc from A/C power and disconnected trouble-drive from SATA data & power.
disconnected the two main Hitachi hard drives (each SATA and 250GB) and connected only the troubled WesternDigital drive.
powered on pc and now there wasn't a freeze on the "Gateway" splash screen. BUT the system, of course, said that it couldn't find a boot device
powered down the pc.
Put my "Lsoft Active recovery" boot-cd in (WinPE-type) and powered pc up.
booted off of the CD just fine without any freeze on the "Gateway" splash screen. trouble-drive wasn't detected in the WinPE environment and the "file recovery" software didn't detect the drive at all; as if the trouble-drive wasn't even hooked up. powered down pc and took out the boot cd.
So I then uninstalled the trouble-drive and reinstalled the hitachi HD's.
booted the pc (which booted fine without any freeze on "Gateway" splash screen),
took out my "USB to IDE/SATA adapter kit w/large drive support up to 500GB" & connected the problem-drive to the pc via this USB kit,
powered on the kit's power supply,
the drive then showed up as a "USB Mass Storage Device" but without a drive letter.
I can only see evidence of the drive via the "Safely remove hardware" icon in the task bar notification area.
When I navigate to Computer Management -> Disk Management the drive doesn't show up at all.
I installed the Western Digital LifeGuard tools software and it was at least able to get the following information about the drive: Size:
LBA Sectors: 4294967295 (2199.02 GB)
CHS -1 : 1 : 1 (2199.02 GB) Drive:
Vendor N/A
Model USB Device
Firmware Rev: <Blank, nothing written here>
S.M.A.R.T Capable No
As for MBR Partition Table, there's nothing… nothing at all.
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I originally thought that the drive was NTFS but Western Digital says that the drive came FAT32 out of the box (with 500GB storage as one volume though?).
I'm going to try a hitachi Drive Fitness Test.
Oh man, so much time wasted and so little information found.
if the drive is reading as approx 2TB; that's standard sign that the system (BIOS or OS) doesn't support LBA yes? I'm confused. I have 2 - 250GB Hitachi drives that I believe are LBA and not CHS. guess I should check to be sure huh? i have to pause now and begin fresh tomorrow.
Thanks for the link. I have an uncanny knack for missing the obvious. That being said I have a question on something that MS states on the FAT32 file system. For KB314463, it states:
"Clusters cannot be 64 kilobytes (KB) or larger."
but then goes on later to state that,
"The maximum possible number of clusters on a FAT32 volume is 268,435,445, and there is a maximum of 32 KB per cluster, along with the space required for the file allocation table (FAT)."
What happened to 33KB through 63KB? If I can have no more than 32 of something then why state that the maximum for the range is 63KB (maximum being stated as >=64KB)?
I know that 2^5 = 32 and 2^6 = 64. So that to go from 32 to 64, one simply needs to add another significant digit (taking a 2^5 max possible range to a 2^6 max possible range). If that was the way that KB was incremented then I can understand.
maybe I'm wrong here… but…. um… when we are talking about actual number of bits/bytes, that comes down to the actual number of digit-positions. So then 32KB equals 8bits * 1000 * 32. This means that we could have 33KB (8*1000*33)or 55KB(prev ex), etc… so why would they state that one can have no more than 63KB when they then state, a few sentences down the page, that clusters have a 32KB maximum?
Did I ask that correctly? Is there something obvious that I'm missing?
I think I may know where the 2TB is coming from, or at least am getting warm. MBR max volume limit for FAT32 is approx 67Mega-clusters, which is approx 4.294Gig # of sectors, which is approx 2.2TB.
I've been reading in my good ol' "Upgrading and Repairing Windows" bible that most common FAT prob's are when a file-system process is interrupted. Then the table designates a cluster as being in use when it is not; causing accessibility problems. I don't have my gear running on an UPS unit and perhaps there was a voltage spike/drop on the circuit that the external was plugged into?
Dunno, but it looks like if it's logical problem, I need to learn how to raw disk edit and fix a possibly damaged MBR. Hopefully that's the case. Otherwise I'll be hunting on ebay for an identical drive with a board that can switch out.
Maybe the drive will go back on the shelf till next year.
Did you run WD's tools with the drive mounted internally?
Check the cables (SATA + power).
Run TestDisk again:
A. At the first window, select “No Log” and press the key.
B. Select which drive to analyse, choose “Proceed” and .
C. Select partition type – Intel if it’s a PC then .
D. Choose Advanced > press .
E. Choose Boot > press .
