Need help sorting out this hard drive. Needs formatting but Windows won't let me.

just Scott

just Scott

just Scott

Soldato
Joined
15 Sep 2006
Posts
4,969
Location
Liverpool
Hey guys. My friend brought his external hard drive round to fix a he couldn't get Windows to recognise it. So I took it out of the enclosure and found that it's a Seagate ST3500820AS (7200.11 500GB drive), exact same model as mine actually, quite a coincidence. I plugged it in and booted into Windows. It seemed fine at first - I could see the drive in Windows, Device Manager and Disk Management. I'm using XP Pro SP3 btw.

However here's were the problems start. If I try to access the drive through My Computer I get: "E:\ is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error"

So I tried to format it in Disk Management. I simple get: "The format did not complete successfully". I tried formatting through cmd and got (with the command "format e:"): "Cannot open volume for direct access". I thought I might be able to do something in PartitionMagic, but when the program is loading it gives me this error then closes: "Init failed: error 100. Partition table is bad".

So now I'm all out of ideas. An interesting point to note is that Disk Management says the drive is empty, but My Computer shows that there's only 150GB of free space left. So is the data still there? My friend would like it if the data could be recovered obviously.

Any ideas anyone? Is the drive totally dead or can it be salvaged?

Thanks

edit: also, I forgot to mention that the drive sometimes just disappears from my computer. After a while of having the computer on it will just stop showing up in My Computer, device manager, etc. If I restart my computer it comes back though.
 
Last edited:
Is there data that needs saving? If not just try deleting the partitions in drive management and re-creating them.
 
Dano said:
Is there data that needs saving? If not just try deleting the partitions in drive management and re-creating them.
Click to expand...

He said it's OK to format if need be, there's no absolutely vital information on there. But it'd be nice if the data could be salvaged.

I was about to delete the partition but the drive disappeared again. :confused:

I think I tried that earlier though, gave a similar result to formatting via disk management.

BigBoy said:
any clicking coming from the drive at idle (when not accessing it)

Did you take ownership of the drive?
Click to expand...

No clicking that I can hear. Nah I'm not the owner, if it's fixed I'll be giving it back to my friend.
 
With operating systems from XP onwards files folders and drives can be 'Owned' by the user profile that created them.

Right click the drive icon and goto the security tab and have alook at the options, if your running XP home then you will need to google 'Take ownership of folders'
 
Oh, right. :o

I'm having a hard time getting windows to recognise the drive at all now. When it is recognised, My Computer goes painfully slow. Now the properties are showing that the drive has 0 bytes of storage at all. And there's no security tab either, just general, tools and hardware.

Also something I've noticed, whenever I open SeaTools the diagnostic software, the hard drive will disappear. It's happened every time I've opened the software.
 
Ok it let me try and delete the actual partition in Disk Management. Here's what happens:

87459661.jpg


And the event viewer looks like this:

76611167.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom