Disk Drive has frozen

Hello, er major issue here and i don't know what to do

Toshiba 500 GB External USB Hard Drive [PX1269E-1G50]

While downloading some data from my FTP and at the same time, opening a winrar file, the hard disk halted.

Windows XP Pro then gave the message "write failure"

Now after re-booting the computer and the drive, windows disk manager sees the drive with no file system (is/was NTFS) and with 100% free disk space.

Instead of the usual "crunching" noise of what i presume is the table of contents being read, the drive makes a "tick tick" sound like a clock.

Windows explorer sees the drive but names it "local disk" and not the original drive name (in this case, "data").

There has been no action taken to repair or fix the drive as yet.

There has been no use of the drive other than the above mentioned reboot.

The drive is now switched off and awaits advice.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, sophia

 

Unfortunately, Toshiba doesn't provide any type of end user diagnostic tools that you can download to test your drive. The Hitachi drive fitness test can be run on non-Hitachi drives, but it's a bootable program and doesn't work on USB drives. You may need to contact Toshiba Tech Support. It sounds like the drive is fairly new and it should be under warranty, I know this doesn't save your data or help alot, but it's all I can tell you. I try to warn people away from Toshiba hard drives for this very reason You can try running chkdsk /r on the drive from a command prompt, it might help, but if your drive is borderline, it might push it over the edge. You may want to look thru the data recovery section here at MajorGeeks....

 

Usually indicative of HDD failure

 

thanks for the replies

OK, I have been searching around for programs that can revive lost data after being quoted 650,000 Yen for a "professional" recovery service.

It seems that the allocation table had become corrupted on the drive.

This is why Windows was seeing (hehehe) the drive as being "empty" and the original drive name had changed.

After a few searches and some advice from an IRC channel, I tried this,
without trying to SPAM!!!!!!!!!!!! the forum, "Stellar Phoenix Recovery Suite".

This application was able to recover 100% of the data so for to help anyone else in this situation I would seriously recommend this application.

I now sleep a lot better at night because of it


sophia

 

Well done.

Also note that if you wanted to rebuild the MBR and Partition tables on a HDD there is a wonderful utility called MBRWork.

Cheers