damaged and unreadable external hard drive Solved/Closed

Question

Hello everyone

I have a little problem with my Maxtor external hard drive in a USB2 enclosure on XP. After struggling to make it accessible, it worked like a charm, no issues, and now this morning I get a little error message on my two partitions that says: Y:/ is not accessible, the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

If anyone has a solution to my problem, I would be grateful.
Thank you all in advance.

Renaud

help · Accepted Answer

Run a chkdsk d: /f from Run. Replace the letter D with the one assigned to your external hard drive.

shion-ares · Answer

Hello  before formatting, use testdisk as it can recover files and tell you if the hard drive really needs to be formatted.

Fabrice · Answer

Hi, I tried testdisk and it allowed me to recover some files I was looking for, but some were unreadable (for example, a movie was only 300MB instead of 700MB!). But it's not because of testdisk, it's due to what I did previously (see my post just above)... However, it was a bit of a mess because it created a lot of notepad files and unreadable .wav files in addition to my recoveries. Anyway, I recovered my folders after testdisk had spent almost 24 hours scanning my external hard drive!!! And after a good hour of organizing the files it had recovered and created...!!!!!!...
There is a software called PC Inspector File Recovery which is free and also could have recovered my folders. It allows you to see what is on the damaged hard drive and copy very quickly!!! But there were fewer than with testdisk!!!...
To conclude, if you have a damaged or unreadable hard drive, I advise you to first use PC Inspector File Recovery, and if you haven't managed to find what you were looking for, then use testdisk...

PS: I have tested both software myself and I had no issues. I can just tell you that PC Inspector File Recovery has a much simpler interface than testdisk and that with testdisk, you will need patience... after that, it's up to you to decide...

I hope this helps you...

vjsparky · Answer

While discussing this topic, I tried unsuccessfully Drive Rescue and PC Inspector File which detects fragments of files all having the same size, which is not very clear to me.

And when trying to run chkdsk e: /f directly in Run, nothing happens, and when I use the DOS command to view the result, I get the following message:

The file system type is NTFS
Unable to determine the version and state of the volume
Abandoning CHKDSK

I also tried Testdisk as indicated, which seems to work for many people, which is why I am interested in it, but in my case
it successfully detects the partition but does not display its contents when I press the 'p' key to list the files.

Here is the tutorial I am using for Testdisk

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Etape_par_Etape

All solutions are good; I will try to put my disk in an external case and connect it to another motherboard

or even put it in an external case on another motherboard to
attempt the first manipulation that seems to resolve the issue.

I am simultaneously on this post where I explain my problem in more detail

https://forums.commentcamarche.net/forum/affich-20244130-recuperer-partition-sans-formater-dd#newanswer

vjsparky · Answer

I just had an experience that makes me proud, which reassures me about the existence of my files on my hard drive with their original names, unlike
Drive Rescue and pc Inspector file, which detect file fragments all the same size

As I mentioned earlier, I use Recuva to recover deleted data from my system hard drive or my memory card by chance but I have never tried it on a disk after formatting, which I only consider as a last resort

And while scanning with it on my hard drive, which is supposed to be
damaged and unreadable according to Windows, I found all my files and I can also recover them

Now, all I have to do is copy everything to another drive while waiting to find a solution to open my disk

It's getting better and better

Damaged and unreadable external hard drive

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