External harddrive refusing access without formatting!

Philocalist

Heavyweight assistance needed, I fear Crying or Very sad

I've a 1TB Buffalo USB2 DriveStation, only a few months old, used as backup. It's one of several that I use, spread across different (major) names.

Original files now unavailable due to damaged drive, so off to backup drive to restore them ... so I thought.......................

I KNOW that these files are / were OK on the Buffalo, as they have been accessed / incremented / added to many times without problem, but this time around, the drive refuses to give me access ... tells me I must format the drive first ... which I obviously do NOT want to do.

Using Vista, Explorer gives no access, neither do the likes of Foldersizes / XYPlorer or Directory Opus. Running Checkdisk (even from the command line) either does not work (ie it does not seen to complete properly) or is ineffective)

Explorer DOES apparently report the drive OK as in the correct size etc, but as soon as I try to access folders on the drive, I get the 'format or else' problem.

Data recovery software appears to be able to 'see' everything OK, but I'm REALLY loathe to go that route just yet, as what it will do is return the files (images) but without the original names or folders ... and I'm talking in excess of 4000 folders, over 1,000,000 images on there Crying or Very sad

... I'm a photographer, and there is almost 700GB of photos on there .....

I've currently got ARAX Disk Doctor scanning the drive, apparently OK .. I say 'apparently', as it has scanned across in excess of 1,110,000 files, but now slowed to snail-pace, with maybe another 200,000 to go .. and they're ticking past at about 5 every 10 seconds or so, yet the software 'predicts' a time left of only a couple of hours, so something is wrong somewhere ......

Anyone help please?

micker377 · Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 994

Pull the hard drive out of the external box, and plug it directly into your computer as a slave. Remember to set the jumpers correctly on the "slave" drive.

Philocalist · Posted: Sun Aug 09, 2009 1:06 pm Post subject:

Hi micker .. thanks for trying to help. What difference is this likely to make, or are you just suggesting an option I could try, to see if it make any difference?

Not too sure on the jumper issue either, as all resident drives in the PCs are sata?

bern · Joined: Mar 12, 2007 Posts: 1434 Location: ann arbor

Philocalist

Hi Bern ... as I type this on another PC, ARAX Disk Doctor is STILL scanning the offending drive .. nearly 48 hours now. Seems to be plodding onwards, but SO slow.
Tried the USB-change-thingy ... 3 different PC's. countless different cables, maybe 20 (yep, 20!) different USB sockets without any change, so currently trying data retrieval, which is raising its own problems ... Task Manager shows memory usage for ARAX as being in excess of 1,000,000K! ... 4GB of RAM, but PC is still so slow to be almost stationary Crying or Very sad

Prime issue here is getting the data safe ... offending drive will be replaced by Buffalo under warranty ... just so bloody frustrating when you DO do a backup, and it turns out to be faulty when you need it, even though it was apparently perfectly OK when previously accessed.

bern · Joined: Mar 12, 2007 Posts: 1434 Location: ann arbor

goretsky

Hello,

Given the number of files on the disk, and depending upon their size and the amount of fragmentation, this may be the normal expected behavior for ARAX Disk Doctor program. It probably would be a good idea to check with their technical support department, though, to verify this.

As Micker377 and Bern noted, you will greatly speed up data recovery efforts by removing the hard disk drive from the Buffalo external USB hard disk drive enclosure and connecting it directly to the computer. That would, however, likely violate the warranty for the drive.

If that data is valauble, though, consider contacting a professional data recovery service such as CBL, DriveSavers, ESS, Kroll Ontrack and so forth. This will possibly be expensive, however, if the data is particularly valuable, it may be worth the cost.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

ugur_akgoz · Joined: Aug 10, 2009 Posts: 1 Location: Ankara

zzron357 · Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 43

Hi Philocalist,
If I had your problem, the first thing I would do is try to see the external drive
from Linux, running a live cd such as system rescue or puppy linux. If data can
be seen it could be copied to another external drive. This would say the drive
and the Buffalo adapter are ok and the problem might be Vista.
If no data, then I would try to remove the drive from the Buffalo unit and test the
drive either in a pc or in a usb adapter other than the Buffalo. I have a Sabrent
external drive adapter with both ide and sata connections, so it does not matter
which the drive is. At a terabit it is probably sata. How hard is it to get into the
box, and will it affect warrantee? Maybe get ok from vendor beforehand.
I prefer to make my own external drives, because I can easily test, replace
and update the drives, even storing drives loaded while using the adapter.
If the drive then is ok, the adapter is the problem. The Buffalo folks might like to
know this. Yes, if the drive is sata you will get faster results with a direct connection
to you pc. If you have sata and power cables needed.
Best wishes, zzron357

Philocalist

Thanks all for chipping in Smile

Just to update the situation: I know enough to realise that any further use of the drive (prior to recovery) was not wise, but thanks for the 'heads up', I realise that others reading this thread may not be so clued up Smile

Before starting to try data recovery, I tried everything I could think of (logical or not!) to access the drive, but 100% without success ... it would appear in Explorer and be identified correctly re size etc, but as soon as I tried to go deeper and access the main subfolder (some 850GB in size), it reported it as zero bytes, and refused access without first formatting.
Some of my attempts at access resulted in me being questioned whether or not I wanted to run chkdsk on the drive .. I tried this unsuccessfuly (3 times I think) from both within Explorer and from the command line.
Drive is only a few months old, so on to the dealer for advice ... they'll happily replace the drive (providing Buffalo will re-imburse them!) ... but I needed to buy a further 1TB drive to give me enough space to attempt recovery Evil or Very Mad

.. this was an internal SATA, which installed without a problem.

After a little research, I downloaded and installed ARAX Disk Doctor, and set it off ... the entire scan of the drive took in the region of 60 hours, during which it frequently reported an inability to read certain files (Cyclic redundancy check, no less ... not good news). A lot of the time for the scan was taken up by prolonged efforts to access these files: sometimes successful, mostly not.

During the scan the PC (a Vista machine with 4 GB RAM) was showing CPU usage at 50%+, and memory usage for Arax alone on excess of 1,000,000K ... which effectively meant that everything else on the PC ground to a halt. (Following completion of the scan, during attempted recovery of data, it's currently showing as 71% physical memory in use!)

When the scan finished, it occurred to me that it would be good to save the result if possible to avoid re-scanning. The software indicated that this was possible, after which I could close the software if I wished, and simply re-start Arax at leisure then simply re-open the file.
60 hours of thumb-twiddling had me a bit twitchy, so I decided to call Arax (in Canada ... I'm in the UK). Not too impressed with the response ... they tried to help, but I genuinely think I had woken the guy up and he was suffering from the worlds worst hangover or something! Turns out that you CANNOT save the scan file, and had I shut down Arax, I would have had to start all over again!

Currently the software IS recovery files, but it's VERY tedious ... it works quite quickly, but stalls every time it hits a file that it cannot cope with (cyclic redundancy check errors showing again). At that stage I've got to cancel the recovery, then reselect files / parameters etc .. no big deal, you would think? ... but it involves maybe 8 clicks of the mouse, each one taking between 3 and 5 minutes to get a reaction, which means that each 'stall' takes maybe 30 minutes to re-start. It also means that I cannot simply walk away and leave it to do the recovery ... Sods Law says that as soon as I turn my back, it hits a dodgy file and freezes Evil or Very Mad

This IS gonna take some time. At this stage file recovery looks successful to a high percentage, certainly well in excess of 95% if I was to take a guess ... which is pretty good, but even 1% of approximately 1.3 MILLION files is still a lot to lose ... and 5% loses me 65,000 files Twisted Evil

... which I guess is much better than losing them all! Very Happy

I'll update this thread for future reference after the recovery has completed, but meanwhile, any and all suggestions are still welcome ... does anyone out there have a way to maybe release some of the 1,000,000K being 'held' by Arax during this operation ... I'm guessing that if I could somehow do that without compromising the recovery, then fixing the 'stalls' would be a matter of 8 quick mouseclicks, rather than waiting 5 minutes after each for a response?

Regards
PW

goretsky

Hello,

My best suggestion is to let the program run until it is complete, and minimize the use of the computer for any other purpose, if possible.

When I offered data recovery services, I had a dedicated computer just for that purpose, with a very minimal software load on it (operating system + latest patches, latest versions of data recovery programs) so that there was little chance of something interfering with the data recovery process.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Philocalist

Hi goretsky Smile

Still chuggung away at this end Confused

It looks as though it will get there, eventually, though there IS going to be some data loss.
Another (relatively) minor problem is that I now realise it is trying to recover EVERYTHING off the drive, including stuff I'd deleted Rolling Eyes

Not much option really ... the alternative was to manually sort through well over a million images without the benefit of thumbnails Laughing

micker377 · Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 994

"Before starting to try data recovery, I tried everything I could think of (logical or not!) to access the drive, but 100% without success ... it would appear in Explorer and be identified correctly re size etc, but as soon as I tried to go deeper and access the main subfolder (some 850GB in size), it reported it as zero bytes, and refused access without first formatting."
May be too late, but usually this scenario indicates a loss of the partition table. Did you try any program to repair the partitions?

Philocalist

Hi Micker ... partitions checked out, apparently OK.

OK ... the recovery eventually finished a few hours ago, after running constantly for almost 9 days.

A worthwhile result? Probably, but not without a further major headache Rolling Eyes

I'm now faced with a total of 838GB of recovered data ... 6700 folders, holding 571,000 images (I decided to omit some from the restore).
The problem? The folders contain ALL of the images, including those that were 'recovered' with less than 100% success, which means that mixed in with all the good stuff are corrupted images (they typically look as though they did not download from the net properly .. colour-shifts and image shifting too).

I'm wracking my brain looking for an automated way of somehow scanning the parent folder as a whole, and then identifying the corrupted images for deletion ... a bit like using the 'search' function, then being able to select, say, images of a particular size or type.
Image size on corrupted files is apparently the same as those successfully recovered, so selection using that particular criteria is a non-starter Rolling Eyes

Anyone have any productive ideas? ... or maybe that problem should run a thread of its own? Confused

goretsky

Hello,

I am not sure if it wil be helpful, but there is a program called FastPictureViewer which is designed to display images quickly. Perhaps it could be used to scan the recovered files? I have not used the program myself, but from the description it sounds like a possible tool to use for examining many pictures.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Philocalist

Hi goretsky Smile

Having a look at FastPictureViewer, will let you know the outcome, though at this stage it appears to display a single picture at a time (quickly!), and then allows pretty much instant images as you scroll (even very large ones) rather than say, scan a folder or produce a sheet of thumbnails ... I guess what I really need is something that will scan folders and identify picture files within that are damaged. The real stumbling block is that I have no idea whatsoever of the criteria I could use for such a selection, as I've not a clue how the damaged files differ from the OK files, apart from physical appearance as they are viewed as images Rolling Eyes

goretsky

Hello,

You might want to contact the author and see if he has any recommendations. Perhaps he has another program in development that you would be a good test environment for, or he may recommend another program which is a better fit for your needs.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

martywer · Joined: Jun 10, 2005 Posts: 4

Try Cerious Software "Thumbs Plus" It shows all the photos as thumbnails, but won't show corrupted ones.

MartyWer