External HDD connection issue now lead to request to Format

[Darren Jay]

Hi

I have a seagate external harddrive which has slowly nosedived. I thought/think the USB cable connection point on it has come a little loose as sometimes I would plug it into PC and it worked fine and other times it wasnt recognised.

Fearing it was on way out I have bought a NAS device and I want to move whats on my HDD to that. Last night I started and things were going well, I managed to get some folders moved over but then after taking a break (needed pc for some other tasks) I tried to connect the HDD but this time its worse. Sometimes PC wont recognise it at all but when it does it now simply loads as new drive ie F: and states that it needs Formatting !!

I initially googled as I dont want to format and lose remaining data and saw people suggest CHKDSK via Command Prompt. This simply isnt working for me. Ive done the following:

Chkdsk F: /x /r
Chkdsk F: /x then Chkdsk F: /f
Each and every time I get the same message:

The type of file system is FAT32.
An error occurred while reading the file application table (FAT 1).
An error occurred while reading the file application table (FAT 2).
There are no readable file application tables (FAT)

Plleeeeeeeeease help me. I also tried TestDisk and it eventually showed me something containing all the folders on the disk but I was pretty lost as to what I was going. Annoying I didnt have space to copy anything to my physical PC. I wanted ideally to move direct from HDD to NAS

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Darren.

Actually in cases like this one it's a bit risky to try the chkdsk command, because this might further corrupt the partition or the data (if this is the initial cause for the issues you're having). You could try accessing the drive via Linux Live CD/USB to see if it's properly recognized and if you can get to your files or try some of the data recovery options from this thread: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
There's one more thing you could try (besides a data recovery company), which is never recommended and should be done only as a last resort. I'm talking about taking the drive out of its external enclosure and connecting it internally to a computer via a SATA connection. Note that this could be useful only if the issue is caused by the external enclosure somehow. This would also void the warranty of the drive.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Solandri]

The type of file system is FAT32.
An error occurred while reading the file application table (FAT 1).
An error occurred while reading the file application table (FAT 2).
There are no readable file application tables (FAT)

Did you actually format the drive as FAT32 in the past? External HDDs are almost always formatted as NTFS. It sounds like your partition table has become corrupted.

Most of the time with external drives, partition table corruption is caused by unplugging the drive while it's in the middle of a read/write operation. If the USB connection is flaky as you say, you can see how this might occur without you physically unplugging the drive.

If you value the data on the drive, open up the enclosure and connect it to a desktop directly via SATA (to eliminate the flaky USB connector). Once you've done that, ideally you should clone the drive (sector-by-sector copy) to another empty drive. Then remove the original drive and run repair operations on the copy. If you don't have an extra drive for this and don't really value the data, then you can just run repair operations on the original drive.

Then create a utility boot CD and boot off of that.
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

It comes with a variety of partition management tools. Unfortunately I haven't used them in a while so I can't tell you which one to use, but some of them will allow you to modify/repair the partition table. In your case the obvious first thing to try is to change the partition ID from FAT32 to NTFS. Then see if the disk becomes readable.
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html

If that doesn't work, there's supposed to be a backup of the partition table. Not every partition management tool I've used allows you to access it. Find one which does, and overwrite the original partition table with the backup. Then see if the disk becomes readable.

If all else fails, you've been working on a clone of the drive, not the original. So you can still send the original to a data recovery specialist. And to reiterate Boogieman above, yes chkdsk /f is a bad idea when the OS doesn't recognize the filesystem. chkdsk is ok since it just reads the drive looking for errors. But the /f flag tells it to try to fix errors, and if it thinks the filesystem is FAT32 when it in fact is NTFS, "fixing errors" may destroy a lot of data. Fortunately it sounds like Windows gave up before it got to this point.

 

[Darren Jay]

Thanks for the replies. Over the weekend I sat down and tried the link you gave me Boogieman to the recovery thread. I downloaded Recuva and ran it and it found loads of files on the HDD.

I managed (took days) to recover whatever it found direct to the NAS. LOADS of files however no longer work and seem to have random names. Ie a movie used to have its title but now shows as RG45GSU.avi and doesnt play. That was just an example as a huge swath of files now seem to have random files names.

Im not convinced Recuva found everything on the drive, plus a large % now have corrupted file names but I figured Ive made some progress

Should I try something else or should I cut my losses now and bin the HDD ?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Well, unfortunately sometimes when data recovery software is unable to retrieve the whole file, it still recognizes it, but it only recovers a fraction of its size and thus the "broken" files are created, which can't actually be used due to the fact that they are incomplete. You could always try with a different program, but there are no guarantees that it would do better. @Solandri gave a pretty detailed and good advice on how to properly try and recover your data (by creating a clone of the problematic HDD), but that is not always possible (e.g. cases when you don't have a spare HDD with enough free space). But if possible, I'd strongly recommend that you follow the advice.
If all else fails, then the most reliable (and sometimes pretty expensive) solution would be - a data recovery company.