Hi everyone.
I built my system back in June with a Western Digital WD15EARS 1.5TB drive as a secondary one. I divided it into 3 patitions for different uses.
Then on 1/12 when I was using utorrent to download on one of the partitions, there was an I/O error. Not knowing what happened, I restarted the computer.
But then I noted the followings:
1) Booting up OS became very slow (3mins as compared to 1 min usually)
2) The 3 partitions all disappeared from windows explorer
Then I attempted the followings:
1) Windows disk management utility: the whole drive showed up as "Not Initialized". Windows prompted me with the option of initializing it by MFT/GUP. Fearing of erasing data I simply closed it.
2) Using hex editor(HxD) I was able to read the disk's contents in hex. It seems that my data is still intact.
3) Aftering surfing the net I tried the software Active@file recovery's 'superscan' function. However it takes >5 mins just to scan for 1Mb(with no results). It would take years to scan 1.5TB.
So what should I do now? How could I recover my data?
One last thought: does this error indicate an imminent error on my disk? Should I RMA it after recovering my data?
Sorry for the long question, thank you in advance.
I built my system back in June with a Western Digital WD15EARS 1.5TB drive as a secondary one. I divided it into 3 patitions for different uses.
Then on 1/12 when I was using utorrent to download on one of the partitions, there was an I/O error. Not knowing what happened, I restarted the computer.
But then I noted the followings:
1) Booting up OS became very slow (3mins as compared to 1 min usually)
2) The 3 partitions all disappeared from windows explorer
Then I attempted the followings:
1) Windows disk management utility: the whole drive showed up as "Not Initialized". Windows prompted me with the option of initializing it by MFT/GUP. Fearing of erasing data I simply closed it.
2) Using hex editor(HxD) I was able to read the disk's contents in hex. It seems that my data is still intact.
3) Aftering surfing the net I tried the software Active@file recovery's 'superscan' function. However it takes >5 mins just to scan for 1Mb(with no results). It would take years to scan 1.5TB.
So what should I do now? How could I recover my data?
One last thought: does this error indicate an imminent error on my disk? Should I RMA it after recovering my data?
Sorry for the long question, thank you in advance.