Hi there, I am having trouble with two hard drives which are not working. Before this happend they were working fine but for some bizarre reason they both no longer work. I think they went down at roughly the same time. I used these two particular HDs to back up files so I would for a while put them in then take them again out when I was finished backing my stuff up. Because they are internal IDE HDs I don't know whether this is good for them? Perhaps this has something to do with the problem I am having. The first HD is a 40G Samsung SP0411N and when I connect this to an IDE channel it shows up as a drive letter but when I access it there is nothing there. This makes no sense to me as when I view it through explorer it indicates that 25.8 GB has been used and 11.4GB is unused. But I can't view the files even though they are there somewhere? I tried to transfer a file to this drive and it worked fine but its the only file I can view. When I defragmentated it recently, in the hope it would help, it stopped at 1,222,371 and displayed the following message...Scandisk found an error: Scandisk could not properly read from or write to cluster 12222400, which contains some of the 'D:\FOUND.000\FILE2846.CHK' file. The contents of this cluster are probably alredy lost'. Then there are three options as follows: (1) Repair (2) Test this sector again and (3) Ignore this error and continue. After selecting '(1) Repair', it continues then repeats this message, as above, with different file2847, file2849 and so on then it crashed. Another message appears as well, as follows...'This drive contains one or more backup copies of the file allocation table (FAT). The copies should be identical, but aren't'. Can this HD be repaired to view my files so I may copy them to another HD or is it irrepairable? Please help! The other hard drive is a Maxtor diamondMax 80g. My PC can't even view this HD for use. It's almost as if I have just bought it new. This HD contained Win 98 along with a few files etc. When I connect it to an IDE channel it now tells me it needs to be formatted before I can use it. This is bizarre as I used it as a master drive before it went down. Again, can this HD be repaired to view my files so I may copy them to another HD or is it irrepairable? Please help!
Had this been asked prior to your attempts to recover using scandisk, and prior to writing other files to the drive, yes. It has, however, been my experience that if scandisk doesn't recover the files, that it will make what is there unreadable. If you want to try doing something you can try Recover My Files, or R-Studio NTFS. Links: http://www.recovermyfiles.com/ http://www.data-recovery-software.net/ (tried both, and they do work, r-studio seems to work better, but you have to have a lot of free space on another drive to use it) Given the fact that you've already let windows try to recover it, it's not likely that they'll be recoverable, or if they are, the integrity of the files can't be guaranteed. Good luck. --EDIT-- Changed formatting
