2nd Hard Drive Recognition Issue or maybe worse

[tdhanson77]

Mensa,
So here's my situation. I have an external 500 GB HDD (Western Dig My Book, FAT32). It suddenly became not recognizable by any PC I plugged it into. I figured the USB 2.0 interface was bad so I took it apart so I could get directly to the SATA connections and then plug it into my PCs internal secondary SATA connection, move the data I needed over and go get myself a new external drive. I'm running Windows XP.

Well it ain't working. I've tried a couple of things:
1. connect to internal SATA connector of PC and boot the PC.
Outcome: Firstly checked the Bios (F1) and yes, it recognized the drive. However, when windows tries to boot, XP hangs and I have to force a physical shutdown. One time I was able to make it into XP, the drive showed up in Device Manager and in Explorer, however, when I clicked on the drive in explorer, the computer hung and had to do a physical shutdown.

2. Power up the PC to assure XP starts all the way up, then attached the SATA cable to the drive, click check for new hardware in device manager.
Outcome: the drive is recognized. Clicked on properties. First tab shows drive is enabled and working properly. click on the "volumes" tab and PC hangs. had to physical shutdown.
Tried it again. This time did not click on properties/volumes. Instead tried to fire up Western Dig Diagnostics program. That program starts running thru the "drive detection" step, but then dies.

Hoping someone can give me some more areas to focus or things to try.

Thanks for any assistance!

 

[tdhanson77]

I picked up a USB 2.0 to SATA adapter so I could see if I could get further by plugging the drive into my Windows 7 laptop. I was able to get further since the drive was not causing my laptop to hang. When I ran a check disk on the drive, i got the following message. Am I sunk, or are their utility programs out there that might allow me to recover the data. Here's the Windows message:

Volume SHARED DATA created 6/24/2007 2:52
Volume Serial Number is E0DC-2260
Windows is verifying files and folders…
Volume SHARED DATA created 6/24/2007 2:52
Windows is verifying files and folders…
File and folder verification is complete.
Insufficient disk space to recover lost data.
124718432 KB in 33319 recovered files.
Windows found problems with the file system that could not be corrected.
488,264,736 KB total disk space.
512 KB in 7 hidden files.
800 KB in 16 folders.
61,515,200 KB in 20,056 files.
340,690,560 KB are available.

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
15,258,273 total allocation units on disk
10,646,580 allocation units available on disk.

Thanks for any assistance!

 

[pjmelect]

I don’t think that you will be able to recover any data on this drive. You shouldn’t have let Chkdsk try and fix the drive as it has probably scrambled up your data even more. The only chance of recovery of your data is to use a professional data recovery company which will be very expensive.
Have you tried using the Western Digital diagnostic software now that it is on the USB interface?

 

[dEAne]

What do you mean you took it apart - the cable for your WD My Book?. Do not use a FAT except when you use that external drive to other OS like linux. Well if that data is very important to you then you need another drive to recover that WD My Book (It must be equal or greater than 500Gb. You should not diagnose it first, it should be BACK UP or recover to another drive.

You can try a third party tools:
https://www.datarecovery.com/
http://www.r-tt.com/
http://www.diskdoctors.net/

Or you can ask your local geek friend. (. .)

 

[tdhanson77]

dEAne,
Thanks for the tip. I used the tools from www.r-tt.com and worked like a flippin' champ. Got most all of my data off the drive.

Thanks mucho!

 

[alim5878]

I want free tools/soft. Only demo version can't give u solutions. If I'm empty pocket, what should I do?.............Is there no alternative?...............All third party tools........are for business, free help is gone...................from this earth?