External Hard Drive currupt after power loss

[stephenp]

Hi there,
My brother in law had his external harddrive enclosure running a 320GB sata drive via USB. He said he accidentally tripped the powerstrip on/off switch. After turning it back on the drive no longer shows in Windows Explorer, but does show up in Computer Management, but as an "Unknown", "Not Initialized" "Unallocated" drive with a capacity of 2048.00 GB. Clearly something is wrong with the drive capacity, which leads me to believe the MBR is messed up (but, you can probably guess I really don't know much about this).
The data is not irreplaceable, but an evening or two would be well spent if we could recover the partitions. There are 3 partitions I believe.
I have tried EaseUS (I've used their software in the past for other data recovery projects). I tried the "rebuild MBR" with no success, and before that I tried "recover Partition". There is also an "initialize GPT" but I don't want to start clicking things without advice.
So, any advice for what to try here?
Thanks!
-Stephen

 

[Nuwan Fernando]

If used correctly This software would give you some options. This has served me well.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

 

[stephenp]

If used correctly This software would give you some options. This has served me well.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Thanks for the suggestion. I had already downloaded TestDisk so I already had PhotoRec available. Admittedly I have not read into too much (which I'll do first thing in the morning) but I did notice a warning that the disk capacity must be correctly detected for it to work. The capacity is not correctly detected as it should only be 320GB instead of 2TB. I am guessing I'll need to get that fixed first, then recover partitions/data next? I'll read more into PhotoRec and see if there are some ways to get the capacity to be read correctly.

Thanks!
-Stephen

 

[Nuwan Fernando]

If possible, Try connecting the HDD directly to motherboard with a SATA cable for optimum support.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there stephenp,

I believe that it may be a good idea to check how the drive appears in BIOS as well.
In case it appears as 2 TB, then I would say that the drive has some internal flaw and unfortunately, software tools will not help.
In case the drive is recognized as having 320GB of storage space, then you can:
- Attach it internally as Nuwan Fernando already suggested in order to rule out a possible enclosure related issue. You will just need a SATA and a power cable.
- Did you get some sort of error messages from the first data recovery tool? I believe it will not hurt to try several other data recovery tools.

After that, you can test the drive as well: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Let us know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[stephenp]

Looks like it's a no go. I plugged it into the mobo and it either gives an error while booting, telling me that there is a problem with the disk and I can press F1 to continue. Looking at Bios I see a drive with 0MB. It seems to spin up when first plugged in or the computer is first powered on, but within 30 seconds all spinning is done and never makes another sound until unplugged and replugged. I tried initializing in Windows but received the Cyclic Redundancy error instantaneously.

I've suggested he look into a simple 2-drive RAID enclosure for the future.

Thanks for your suggestions everyone!

-Stephen