[talkshowhost]

i seem to just have problems springing up around me everywhere just now.

here goes....
got a new hard drive the other week (maxtor 250GB 16 MB cache) and put it in an external case (Icy Box External Enclosure IB-350-U USB2.0) it has been running fine for the last few weeks no problems at all until last night when transferring files it came up with couldn;t access file (or something like that ) i restarted the comp and it working again. however today theres nothing. the computer can see the hard drive in 'my computer' but when clicking on it comes up with the cannot access....corrput (again something like that) i can go into disk management and the computer will see it and say its healthy.

i tried a different hard drive in the icy box and it recognisises that fine so i switched the hard drive with one inside the computer to see if the BIOS picks it up and it is shown there. used powermax (maxtor utility) and did a basic scan and it passed so am now doing the full scan which could take a while.

anyone have any ideas about whats going on? is the hard drive dead!? would i be able to access it all from elsewhere. thanks in advance for any help i'm at my wits end and there is a lot of stuff on the disk i wouldn't like to lose.

cheers.

[redsolar]

I've seen this happen all too many times recently with lower quality USB2 enclosures. Depending on the chipset the enclosure is using these errors may occur. What happened most likely, is your file table got corrupted. The data should be intact, but you will need to use a third-party recovery tool to get it back. I think Maxtor's tools provide some functionality for recovering the data (they sublicense Ontrack DataRecovery software). There is a good free utility available here. If those don't help, I have had very good luck with GetDataBack series which is not free, but well worth it.

Please post your progress.

[talkshowhost]

thanks for the reply i have just finished the full scan now and it passed so according to maxtor that measn there is no problem with the drive at all. i'll give these programs a go and let u know. thanks again for the quick reply

1 question - what USB enclosure would u reccomend seen as that one seems pretty C**p.

[redsolar]

I would rather recommend a firewire enclosure - I have seen much better luck with them. I have again seen a lot of reports even with Maxtor's/WDs native enclosures losing data, so it's not really specific to a manufacturer. Sometimes it's random reason, most likely caused by power fluctuations on the USB bus.

You can also try SATA enlosures - those seem very reliable. I would just stay away from USB, unless it's a flash drive.

Granted both firewire and SATA enclosures will be more expensive, they should be more reliable, and when it comes to date, reliability is the key.

[MarcMathew]

Originally Posted by talkshowhost

i seem to just have problems springing up around me everywhere just now.

here goes....
got a new hard drive the other week (maxtor 250GB 16 MB cache) and put it in an external case (Icy Box External Enclosure IB-350-U USB2.0) it has been running fine for the last few weeks no problems at all until last night when transferring files it came up with couldn;t access file (or something like that ) i restarted the comp and it working again. however today theres nothing. the computer can see the hard drive in 'my computer' but when clicking on it comes up with the cannot access....corrput (again something like that) i can go into disk management and the computer will see it and say its healthy.

i tried a different hard drive in the icy box and it recognisises that fine so i switched the hard drive with one inside the computer to see if the BIOS picks it up and it is shown there. used powermax (maxtor utility) and did a basic scan and it passed so am now doing the full scan which could take a while.

anyone have any ideas about whats going on? is the hard drive dead!? would i be able to access it all from elsewhere. thanks in advance for any help i'm at my wits end and there is a lot of stuff on the disk i wouldn't like to lose.

cheers.

It happens some times that you hard drive become inaccessable. It happened with me also. To recover my data I used Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS . What I did, I simply downloaded the demo version of software from the site http://www.stellarinfo.com/cd-data-recovery.htm . Demo version shown me all my recovered file. I was delighted with the result. Not a sigle bit of data was lost.

Hope this software will be helpful to you also.

Best of Luck

[H3X4D3C1M4L]

I've had problem with Firewire and Windows XP, it will frequently get the delayed write fail... so unless you're under Linux I wouldn't.

Vantec USB (or the USB/FW enclosure I have to give you an option) usually work very well.