Question Need Help Triple HDD Crash all files gone? All Hardrives say (Disk structure is corrupted and unreadable)

bladem2127

Honorable
Sep 12, 2018
19
3
10,515
Brand new Computer all different brands of HDD's 1 brand new, 1 old, 1 refurbished. Everything ran fine until today, 2 HDD's ran on a different pc, 1 for a year(Refurbished), the other a few months(Very limited use, dead end storage basically).

I had a previous SSD crash on my old pc and it bricked it, lost 6TB, of applications recordings, games, still cant get those back. Now my brand ish new HDD's are doing the same my brand new 6TB just died i only noticed because i saw my steam games where missing, then i looked around all my other drives where working fine, so i hoped it was a bug and restarted my PC waited 60s turned off my HDD dock with my 3 HDD's waited 60s then booted my pc, now every drive except my NVME are gone, what happened?!


 
Don't panic just yet. Unplug all but one external hard drive from the caddy.
Unplug the USB cable to the PC and restart the computer (without) the external USB cable plugged in.

I want the PC to boot a full boot and shut down with out the external caddy plugged in.

Now restart the PC, after restart plug in the external caddy with the one drive and report back if it now shows normal.
 
Don't panic just yet. Unplug all but one external hard drive from the caddy.
Unplug the USB cable to the PC and restart the computer (without) the external USB cable plugged in.

I want the PC to boot a full boot and shut down with out the external caddy plugged in.

Now restart the PC, after restart plug in the external caddy with the one drive and report back if it now shows normal.
All Drives still show corrupted and unreadable, following your instructions with each HDD solo
 
Again don't fully panic I have to have three different caddies and numerous hookups to get some drives to come to life. I just don't see all three killing themselves all at once.

I could be the caddy.
Same it makes no sense, my 6TB was running hard before i took it out and followed your instructions. It was warm almost hot to the touch, Ill see if i cant round up a sata cable and try and hook it directly
 
  • Like
Reactions: stonecarver
Again don't fully panic I have to have three different caddies and numerous hookups to get some drives to come to life. I just don't see all three killing themselves all at once.

I could be the caddy.
K So far the 6TB still Reads corrupted, ima try the other 2 and get back to you.


Edit: All drives read Corrupt as the first screenshot showed
 
  • Like
Reactions: stonecarver
Also when your in windows bring up Disk Management , does the drive show up in there and does the drive have a drive letter?
Yea has everything even shows all the GB's where is should be and says its Healthy (Primary Partition)


EDIT:
View: https://imgur.com/a/kzsEEfb


Also When i booted up all the drives back inside the dock, my F drive said access denied instead of corrupted and unreadable
View: https://imgur.com/a/R0RDcnK
 
Last edited:
I wish both the "C" and the "F" drive were not so full there is no room and this may well be why it's throwing a fit.

How about another computer to check the three external drive out on?

If I go silent coming up I have to do something for about an hour.

I still feel the drives are fine and it's the host Windows as you have now plugged into PC direct so that took the caddy out of the mix.
 
I wish both the "C" and the "F" drive were not so full there is no room and this may well be why it's throwing a fit.

How about another computer to check the three external drive out on?

If I go silent coming up I have to do something for about an hour.

I still feel the drives are fine and it's the host Windows as you have now plugged into PC direct so that took the caddy out of the mix.
Ill give it a shot, can i use the caddy to test on another pc, or should i attempt to get inside my old PC and plug it in direct?

EDIT: Also all my PC's are almost full up, my old pc especially
 
Were just looking for working proof of life if the other PC will read the drives and let you have access to them. :)

Also I don't like G and E are raw
I ran a Full Virus scan just to see if it would read into the drives and it does, im 60% of the way through atm, still just curious to see what happens, but the files are there and readable through avast at least. Once its done ill check the drives on my other PC and get back to ya. In an hour 30 i got to head out aswell, But il do as much as i can before i leave.
 
  • Like
Reactions: stonecarver
Were just looking for working proof of life if the other PC will read the drives and let you have access to them. :)

Also I don't like G and E are raw
Sorry for the late reply, terrible time for my Drives to fail like this. Did 2 tests. One i booted in safe mode, 1 Drive the F drives works and is readable, but some files apear to be corrupted on my main PC. Now i moved my dock to my other PC, F changed to G and all files are readable G n E were still unopenable. The now G drive (Extgamestr) has an issue when plugged in, windows wants to scan and fix it. The other drives G n E just like my main pc it wants to format them (Which i wont)
 
The now G drive (Extgamestr) has an issue when plugged in, windows wants to scan and fix it
Sounds about right. You have to remember you only have 1% free space that drive is choking . that's always a crap shot as I have lost data when windows wants to do the scan and I have also had good luck.

It looks like your going to have to need three more drives or one that is larger than all three drives and use data recovery tools to manually do one drive at a time and retrieve your stuff to get items off the old drives.

I'm just getting going brain/coffee :)

There are many , many programs out there to clone, fix the file structure, open the disk up to get to your items on the sick disks.

one is

https://www.easeus.com/ppc/partitio...cVV8jLZlh2Wj9Xk7zTqURfvNQvPfBe9BoC3uQQAvD_BwE

But over on majorgeeks.com is a lot of different choices on programs to do what it seems your in for to save your items.

https://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/sortdate/data_recovery_233b.html

Me I would clone one drive at a time than work on recovery off the clone.

I have to wonder just for the sake of understanding what went wrong. And having the drives full was not helping but is there more to the story.

Did the caddy get dropped?
Did you have a power outage?
Do you have a virus on computer?

I would start with the drive that windows says it wants to scan the "G" drive. When you boot computer if that drive is connected window will say hit any button to skip scan HIT ANY BUTTON get into windows and start moving stuff off that drive.

If windows is on and you plug in drive from the caddy and windows says it wants to scan the drive you can hit continue without scanning.

It's like the back bone of thinking here on Tom's but in hindsight if you had backups on what you run on those drive this would be but a speed bump but we all live and learn. Right now I see some good deals on 10TB HDD's just an FYI.

Anyways start with the "G" that's your most working drive at the moment.

Also going back to your first post get some room cleared up on your "C" drive to at least get out of the red.

A good place to start " have hidden files turned on" is go to --users--- your main account---appdata---local--- and go down to the temp folder. If you have never emptied this folder you can have Gb's of old crap in there you can just toss.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: bladem2127
I just cant believe all 3 drives failed, my G 6TB still had 2Tb's left, my E drive was full of all my gaming videos/and every photo and video from all my phones I've ever had. and F was a drive that existed almost always constantly full for years on end i didn't mind if that one crapped out.

I had a power outage a week ago, but each drive is designed to be a quick disconnect to prevent a loss of data, not a full system failure.

The last thing i did was update S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 but stopped it half way on my C drive. It said files were corrupted then i noticed my G6TB drive files were unreadable, but all other drives were good, thought it was a bug and restarted my PC then boom all other drives died cept C.

I really really don't want to try and recover my data the last drive i did that on it duplicated half of my data into hundreds of the same image and I lost so so much.

I just got this PC last month and never had a change to get a backup going, honestly didn't think I needed it, I've never had brand new hard drives just pop before.
 
I would start with a SMART report:

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/index/smart/

Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

Also, can you show us the Partitions tab in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

When a drive is RAW, it means that Windows can see the partition table, but it can't make sense of the file system.
Doing the DMDE Scan's now here is the Crystal Disk Info

View: https://imgur.com/a/eA37cy1


View: https://imgur.com/a/Qt5cExO


View: https://imgur.com/a/qKOQBSs
 
I would start with a SMART report:

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/index/smart/

Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

Also, can you show us the Partitions tab in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

When a drive is RAW, it means that Windows can see the partition table, but it can't make sense of the file system.
Wasnt sure what you were looking for with the DMDE so hopefully in these screenshots, its what you where asking for

View: https://imgur.com/a/mcuE2ls


View: https://imgur.com/a/DVslOnw


View: https://imgur.com/a/hW1Ebm8