Cannot access external HD

wow346

Reputable
Jun 5, 2014
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4,510
Hi everyone, I'm having some issues accessing the data on my external hard drive. It's a 3TB Seagate, purchased a couple years ago, should have ~2TB of data on it. It was plugged into a desktop, and I believe the power failed during a file transfer. The drive is in good physical condition and sounds normal.

Currently Windows 7 recognizes the drive but when I try to open it, it asks me to format the drive. Sometimes it says cyclic redundancy check. I don't format it as I need to access my data.

When running chkdsk /r, it hangs on "CHKDSK is verifying Usn journal" for hours, then eventually returns "Insufficient disk space to fix the Usn Journal $J data stream." Does anyone know what this means? Looking online I've seen suggestions to delete the Usn journal using fsnutil, but I wonder if this is safe.

We also plugged it directly into a desktop using SATA and ran the Spinrite software. It went through the whole drive and didn't find any bad blocks, but the above symptoms are still happening.

Also, Disk Management thinks the format is RAW, but CHKDSK always correctly recognizes it as NTFS.

Please help! Thanks!
 
Solution
With these results it's starting to seem more like a failing drive after all. Let me suggest a utility to test the drive (as a boot disk)

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/item/seatools-dos-master/



Assuming the drive is good since it passed the diagnostic test it seems the file system is corrupted. Before going to recovery software (which isn't always free) I can suggest an option which is 100% free if not 100% certain to work (but I have used it successfully a few times). That is, use a Linux (Ubuntu) liveCD. When you boot the Ubuntu installer it will get to a point before it installs where it offers a choice: "Try Ubuntu" or "Install Ubuntu." Selecting the first option loads the Ubuntu desktop directly off the DVD-ROM without touching the hard drive.

Ubuntu is able to read and write to NTFS disks, and it will see USB attached drives too. A few times I've seen it recognize an NTFS filesystem that Windows itself wouldn't (as odd as that sounds). If running Ubuntu every time you need to access those files isn't a good option you can back that stuff up somewhere else (assuming you have a "somewhere else" with sufficient capacity), then reformat the 3TB external and reload the stuff on it
 
To create an Ubuntu disk download the .iso image from here

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

insert a blank dvd in the drive and when the download is complete right-click the downloaded file and select "burn disk image"

Then reboot the PC with the disk in the drive. How to get to the boot menu to select this disk depends on the make and model of system you have

Dell - press F12 on bootup
HP - press F9 on bootup
ASUS - press F8 on bootop
Acer or Gateway often use F10
 

wow346

Reputable
Jun 5, 2014
2
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4,510
Thanks for the suggestion! I tried it and but it didn't seem to work. I got the following error:

Error mounting /dev/sdb1 at /media/ubuntu/Seagate Expansion Drive: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=999,gid=999,dmask=0077,fmask=0177" "/dev/sdb1" "/media/ubuntu/Seagate Expansion Drive"' exited with non-zero exit status 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

Also I tried using CHKDSK again. Now it usually returns:

CHKDSK is veryifying Usn Journal...
10 percent complete. (x of 8999616 USN bytes processed)
Unable to read the Usn Journal $J data stream.

I ran it 3 times, and the x seems to vary anywhere between 1355776 and 3182592. Does anyone know what this USN journal stuff means? Is it safe to delete it using fsnutil?

Thanks!
 

adamseeley

Commendable
Sep 3, 2016
1
0
1,510
My problem (to hopefully help anyone else with this predicament):

Windows 10

My internal SSD data drive got damaged during a large data write from some software.
It crashed, Windows tried to repair the disk itself but after rebooting gave me this error when I tried to open the drive again:


E:\ is not accessible.

The parameter is incorrect.



I tried Piriform... was impressed at first but ended up getting a lot broken data back.

Someone pointed me towards Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
http://www.stellarinfo.com/windows-data-recovery.php

This seemed to find everything and is currently pulling all the 'lost' data off my bad disk and restoring it happily to a backup disk (phew!).

Absolutely try Piriform, but if results aren't good then try Stellar Phoenix (it truly just saved my ass!).

Good luck.

Adam.