HDD failure - recovered onto new volume - new volume fails too - TWICE

[IgnatzS]

So I had a 1 TB external HDD, NTFS format, USB 3.0. It's full of my work files, music etc, 800 Gb. One day, Windows (Win 7 x64) says I need to format it to use it. I run chkdsk, no physical errors, it just seems as if the MBR is messed up and the drive just shows up as unformatted.

I use Active File Recovery, shows the volume mostly complete, manages to recover 98% of all my files. I recover them onto a new drive. 2 weeks later that drive has same issue. I chalk it up to coincidence, shitty drives (first was Seagate, second was Toshiba). So I recover it again, manages to recover 100% my files, saved it onto a new WD drive instead.

5 months later - SAME ISSUE. Are my files cursed or is my Windows fucking with me?

 

[Mattios]

Could well just be unlucky and you got a series of bad drives. It's quite hard to tell as the occurrences are so spread out.

Are you using a new drive each time? If so try using the same one for a long period of time, and if it can have files written to afterwards each time but seems to get randomly corrupted then it is likely a software issue.

 

[Solandri]

The fact that it's happened with 3 different drives suggest the problem is not with the drives. If you're leaving the drives plugged in 24/7, maybe it's a flaky USB 3.0 port. If you're connecting and disconnecting the drives, most of the time I see this problem happen it's because the drive was unplugged without first removing it with the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" tool.

In theory you should be safe without using that tool if you've got the write caching for removable media turned off. But I've seen a drive corrupted this way when the only thing I did was insert it, read some files, then remove it without first ejecting.

 

[IgnatzS]

Mattios - Yeah, new drives each time, but I'll try that out to see if its software related, thanks!

Solandri - Different ports but I have had to remove it without safely ejecting it first, so it could definitely be that. Win 7 is just so slow in loading the damn thing that I can't when I'm in a rush. Thank you, at least I know what it might be! Question is how can I fix it without losing all my data?

 

[Solandri]

Question is how can I fix it without losing all my data?

Usually it's just a corrupt partition table. Those can be easy or hard to fix. Easiest is if the partition ID got changed. Windows doesn't recognize all partition types, and mistakenly claims the drive needs to be formatted if it detects an unknown partition type. (OS X is even worse about this, and has misled many people to format a drive with perfectly good data.)

Try some of the partition management tools on this boot CD. If the partition is still there, make sure the ID matches what you originally formatted the drive as (usually NTFS).

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

If that doesn't work, usually there's a backup of the partition table. Some of the tools on that CD should be able to restore the main table from the backup. But this is starting to get to the point where you should duplicate the drive (sector by sector) to another drive before messing with it any further.