OK, been a while since I posted on these forums, but what's stopping me now! I'll start from the beginning.
I have a Seagate 7200.10 IDE 500GB drive sat in an Icy Box external enclosure. The disk is more or less full of video data and I constantly use it. The drive itself is about 6-8 months old, the enclosure 3 months.
Up until the other day it had been working fine. I switch it on when I need it and turn it off to prevent the drive getting hot for prolonged periods (I had a previous external hard drive die, most likely because it stayed on 24/7). On this one occasion I switch off the drive as normal by simply flicking the power switch on the back. Note - I do not use the "Safely Remove Hardware" facility as I've never needed to! I turn the drive back on, and it takes ages to do anything. After a period of time windows does it's autorun search. For some reason the window does not pop up. I open explorer and to my surprise the drive seems to have lost it's name. It simply shows up as Local Disk (T
(T is specified by me). I try to open the drive in explorer when I am presented with:
T:\ is not accesible.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadble.
I'm thinking the hard drive has died. I install a handy copy of Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional to test the drive. One full disk diagnostic and 4 hours later the software gives the hard drive a clean bill of health. Physically, the drive seems to be intact.
I run an advanced scan of the drive to see if my files are still there. They are. Well most of them appear to be, including some deleted files as you would expect to find with this sort of data recovery program.
So... It appears that the hard drive has lost the setting that tells windows it is a NTFS drive with bla bla bla. Windows cannot tell if it is RAW or NTFS. Before you say it... I know backing up is essential... Which is why I will finally start when I can afford the 300 odd blank dvds needed for it! I am struggling to find space to backup the 500GB of data, and so I have been investigating ways that I can rebuild the partition/index/whatever to allow the hard drive to simply work again. Of course I can't find anything. In fact it took ages for me to find anyone who had encountered a similar issue.
Is there a way to do this?
P.S. Yes yes, I will backup. I know what I deserve, etc.
I have a Seagate 7200.10 IDE 500GB drive sat in an Icy Box external enclosure. The disk is more or less full of video data and I constantly use it. The drive itself is about 6-8 months old, the enclosure 3 months.
Up until the other day it had been working fine. I switch it on when I need it and turn it off to prevent the drive getting hot for prolonged periods (I had a previous external hard drive die, most likely because it stayed on 24/7). On this one occasion I switch off the drive as normal by simply flicking the power switch on the back. Note - I do not use the "Safely Remove Hardware" facility as I've never needed to! I turn the drive back on, and it takes ages to do anything. After a period of time windows does it's autorun search. For some reason the window does not pop up. I open explorer and to my surprise the drive seems to have lost it's name. It simply shows up as Local Disk (T
(T is specified by me). I try to open the drive in explorer when I am presented with:T:\ is not accesible.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadble.
I'm thinking the hard drive has died. I install a handy copy of Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional to test the drive. One full disk diagnostic and 4 hours later the software gives the hard drive a clean bill of health. Physically, the drive seems to be intact.
I run an advanced scan of the drive to see if my files are still there. They are. Well most of them appear to be, including some deleted files as you would expect to find with this sort of data recovery program.
So... It appears that the hard drive has lost the setting that tells windows it is a NTFS drive with bla bla bla. Windows cannot tell if it is RAW or NTFS. Before you say it... I know backing up is essential... Which is why I will finally start when I can afford the 300 odd blank dvds needed for it! I am struggling to find space to backup the 500GB of data, and so I have been investigating ways that I can rebuild the partition/index/whatever to allow the hard drive to simply work again. Of course I can't find anything. In fact it took ages for me to find anyone who had encountered a similar issue.
Is there a way to do this?
P.S. Yes yes, I will backup. I know what I deserve, etc.