the other day i was organizing my music on my external hdd using my laptop. out of nowhere my computer like froze up and after 15min i decided to unplug the hdd withouth safely removing it first. after that my computer unfroze. so i plugged my hdd back in and it was now asking me to format my hdd, of course i wasnt going to do that cause all my family pictures and movie/music collection was on there. so i tried googling my problem and i came up with the concluson that i might have corrupted my MBR (master boot Record) but thats just a guess. Now my question is, is there a way to fix my hdd without having to reformat it or lase any data? is there somekind of software (preferably free) that could do this? and im jobless so i cant really take it to a specalist to fix. i dont have the hdd with me at the moment since im at a friends house, but its a 150gb iomega external hdd, i just cant remember the model number. thanx in advance
The vast majority of external hard drive failures are the enclosure, not the drive. Try taking the drive out of the box and putting it in a desktop PC and see if you can extract the data.
well its not a 3.5" hdd its a slim one im guessing laptop sized one but i dont have the tools to take it out, its not an ordinary phillips head
2.5" hard drives can usually still be used in desktop PCs, depending on what the power connectors look like.
First hook it back to your computer and do a chkdsk x: /f (x = the drive letter of the external drive). You can do this from the command prompt (run box) or you can do a scandisk (make sure the 2 boxes to fix errors are checked) from my computer/external drive/properties/tools/error checking. Depending how large the drive is it can take a half hour or longer. If the external drive was writing or reading when you unplugged it, it probably got corrupted. This will cause the problem you describe (the error that the drive needs to be formatted "or drive showing up as RAW" is a classic symptom). There is probably nothing wrong with the enclosure or drive since it still shows up on your computer. The MBR usually only comes into play on drives that have operating systems. In your case a fixmbr/fixboot won't fix a corrupt drive. Worst case scenario that a chkdsk doesn't fix it, all your data is still safe. A few mb's of file corruption will make an entire drive seem unusable but all the data is still in it's original place. This problem has occured to me several times on my system hard drive where I do a hard shutdown, a chkdsk has always fixed it. It's a very powerful utility. You can use the free testdisk (photorec addon) to recover your data if all other efforts fail. Testdisk also has more powerful tools to fix hard drive corruption.
jony218 thanx your suggestion helped, i had to use the Testdisk cause the first 2 suggestions didnt work but now it shows up like ol times
Disable write caching on that device or optimize for quick removal,i think it's right click on drive,properties,can't remember if you click advanced on the first tab then policy's or if policy is already there,just clik on all buttons it'll be there somewhere
hey jony218 it only worked once and after that i safely removed it and now it says its corrupted when i click on the drive instead of telling me to format it. i tried to do the same steps with testdisk but no luck. also when i got it to work that one time it was still coming up as raw instead of FAT. any help
Data needs to be retrieved then reformat,after format set drive as i mentioned above.getdataback would be the best option sadly it's not free tho a free version can be got *winks*,perhaps jony knows of a decent fast free data recovery software. Also: get another external hdd if the data on the drive you have now is not backed up else where
well i tried the getdataback but it doesnt show everything i had on the hdd, but i went back to that testdisk and it seems to let me copy the files that i couldnt see so ill do as you say scorpNZ but i only have a 80gb backup drive but 125gb of content on the damaged drive so it looks like im gonna have to delete some stuff. thanx
