- Jun 12, 2012
- 5
- 0
- 10,510
I have had the drive for about two years now and it has always worked well, with the exception of one time fairly early one when the master file table became corrupted somehow. Recently, I acquired another WD 2TB MyPassport drive and was in the process of backing up the contents of the first to it, when it froze on one of the files half way through. I canceled and restarted the copy operation, and it hung at the same spot again. At this point, other matters drew me away, and when I returned to try again, the drive was no longer accessible from Windows. The drive icon still shows up, and it gets assigned a letter, but it does not display how full it is and any attempt to click on or access the drive in any way causes the computer to freeze.
I have tried using a different cable and different usb ports to no avail. I ran chkdsk from the command console and it said, "The type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive." Some time later, it displayed, "Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule the volume to be checked the next time the system restarts?" I have not yet tried scheduling it as my machine is dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu and I am uncertain when the check would be run or if it would mess with the boot loader. (I messed up the Windows boot sectors when I installed Ubuntu. Got them back with boot-repair but I am a bit gun shy about anything that might screw it up again.) I also attempted to run GetDataBack, which is the data recovery program that was previously successful at restoring the master file table, but, as soon as I clicked on the drive within the program, the computer froze again.
I also tried using both of the operating systems on my laptop (Windows 7 and OS X Mavericks) to access the drive. Windows failed in the same fashion as my tower did, however, Mac was able to access the drive and see and access all the folders. It did take a long time to open some of the folders though, and while I was able to copy some of the remaining data off, the majority of the files cause the copy process to cancel with an error message that said something along the lines of "Finder cannot complete the operation because some of the data in file (whichever) cannot be read or written." If it matters, the Windows install on my laptop was the one doing the back up process when it froze initially. Ubuntu was also able to access the drive and its contents, however it suffered the same problems as OS X. (My reason for installing Ubuntu was to take advantage of my tower's usb 3.0 ports to try to salvage as much data as possible but too much of it was unreadable to make this viable.)
I have tried to research possible explanations/solutions but most of the hard drive problems I've found are about drives which are completely unreadable or display a file system corrupted error. I thought perhaps it was the master file table again, but when that happened last time, the drive showed as unformatted in both Windows and Mac. (I was never able to discern what caused that event.) I should probably mention that I had noticed it fail to initialize properly in Windows a few times before it failed completely. On these instances, the computer displayed the "This drive must be formatted before it may be used" message. These instances did concern me slightly, however, simply disconnecting and reconnecting the hard drive caused it to work properly, so I did not think very much of it at the time.
Any ideas as to what might be wrong with my drive or recommendations for other diagnostic and data recovery tools? I am very much hoping that the data itself isn't actually corrupted as I would definitely like to recover it. Sorry for the length, I hope I haven't been too horribly verbose.Thank you for your time and your responses.
-Tony
I have tried using a different cable and different usb ports to no avail. I ran chkdsk from the command console and it said, "The type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive." Some time later, it displayed, "Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule the volume to be checked the next time the system restarts?" I have not yet tried scheduling it as my machine is dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu and I am uncertain when the check would be run or if it would mess with the boot loader. (I messed up the Windows boot sectors when I installed Ubuntu. Got them back with boot-repair but I am a bit gun shy about anything that might screw it up again.) I also attempted to run GetDataBack, which is the data recovery program that was previously successful at restoring the master file table, but, as soon as I clicked on the drive within the program, the computer froze again.
I also tried using both of the operating systems on my laptop (Windows 7 and OS X Mavericks) to access the drive. Windows failed in the same fashion as my tower did, however, Mac was able to access the drive and see and access all the folders. It did take a long time to open some of the folders though, and while I was able to copy some of the remaining data off, the majority of the files cause the copy process to cancel with an error message that said something along the lines of "Finder cannot complete the operation because some of the data in file (whichever) cannot be read or written." If it matters, the Windows install on my laptop was the one doing the back up process when it froze initially. Ubuntu was also able to access the drive and its contents, however it suffered the same problems as OS X. (My reason for installing Ubuntu was to take advantage of my tower's usb 3.0 ports to try to salvage as much data as possible but too much of it was unreadable to make this viable.)
I have tried to research possible explanations/solutions but most of the hard drive problems I've found are about drives which are completely unreadable or display a file system corrupted error. I thought perhaps it was the master file table again, but when that happened last time, the drive showed as unformatted in both Windows and Mac. (I was never able to discern what caused that event.) I should probably mention that I had noticed it fail to initialize properly in Windows a few times before it failed completely. On these instances, the computer displayed the "This drive must be formatted before it may be used" message. These instances did concern me slightly, however, simply disconnecting and reconnecting the hard drive caused it to work properly, so I did not think very much of it at the time.
Any ideas as to what might be wrong with my drive or recommendations for other diagnostic and data recovery tools? I am very much hoping that the data itself isn't actually corrupted as I would definitely like to recover it. Sorry for the length, I hope I haven't been too horribly verbose.Thank you for your time and your responses.
-Tony
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