Samsung F1 1TB failed?

Using F1 1TB as a secondary drive for media etc, about 500gb used.

All was fine until I turned my pc off, unplugged it, along with my boot drive (XP), as i had to swap my boot disk to another one to get some files, and its a bit fiddly.

Put back my normal boot drive, along with the F1, into windows fine, tried to access the F1 via My Computer, and it says 'This drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?'

In Disk Management it says its capacity is 7.88GB, File System is blank, but when i right click and go properties, it says the File System is 'RAW'.

So basically...is there any way to rescue this disk and whats on it, or is it bye bye sammy

It sounds very much like the native LBA of the disk has been altered actually. You can fix this using http://www.hdat2.com/ this tool, I have had to do it myself once. Do not do anything else to the disk, don't try to format it or delete the partition structure before you try this. There are instructions on the website which will help you. If this does not restore your disk to it's full addressable capacity then yes, it may well be knackered.

Weather or not you can save the data on the disk, I would not like to guess, but your best chance to do so would be to follow the instructions to check and if necesary reset the disk's LBA to to it's proper size, around 931gb and then see if you can access it or use some data recovery software on it. You may need to perform a a quick format on this disk, but you shouldn't need to do a low level format. This does not mean that data recovery software can't get some or all of your data back though, there is a fair chance that it can.

Oh I almost forgot, you will also want to check out http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk ...this piece of software can restore the parition table of a disk, which you may very well need to do after resetting the LBA, your data could well be immediatly accessible then. Good luck!

I have one of these sounds terrible, cant afford to back up my data as it means anothe 500gb for backup

A2Z said:

'This drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?'

Click to expand...

we know we have your data but we wanna **** with ur head a bit....shall we erase (Y/N) ?

MrMoses said:

I have one of these sounds terrible, cant afford to back up my data as it means anothe 500gb for backup

Click to expand...

Doubling up on your hard drives is the most economical way to back up now. When you are talking about hundreds of gigabytes of data dvd's are no-longer all that useful or indeed really any cheaper.

You can buy a 500GB drive for £40-45 now.

Unfortunately, if you can't afford to back your data up then you have to accept the very real possibility of losing it all.

If this issue is what I suspect it is, then I doubt very much weather you will ever see it, it's very unusual. A2Z, do you by chance use a Gigabyte motherboard?

Hi guys sorry for late replies

Yes i do have a gigabyte mobo, and it seems its a very common problem, f1 1tb and gigabyte mobo together.

You were right Moeks, I editted the LBA of the disk from 33mb (which it also showed in the bios) to the full 1tb.

This enabled windows to see the full 1tb, although only 7.88gb was partitioned, the rest was unpartitioned. I did manage to used a program called File Scavenger to access the disk, and all my files are still there.

Havent got round to putting all the files to different HD's yet as need to find 500gb of space, (only got a 160gb and 500gb and both are nearly full), but all the files are safe.

Thanks.

Arhh good, glad to hear you managed to save your data and bring your disk back to health.

I don't know what it is with Gigabyte boards and Samsung disks, very odd indeed. I had exactly the same thing happen to me with a Samsung F1 1TB on an older Gigabyte 965 board.