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09-07-2008, 10:29 AM   #1
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I finally lost a hard drive

I knew this would eventually happen; I lost one of my external backup hard drives yesterday. I fired up the backup drives and when I tried to connect to one of them, I kept getting the message "Disk is not formatted. Do you want to format now?"
But as you may have guessed, I do have multiple backups so there's no real loss other than I now have a very fancy brick sitting on my desk.

As an aside, does anyone know what could have happened to the hard drive? It is a Western Digital MyBook external drive.

09-07-2008, 11:00 AM   #2
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Not sure, but you may just have to run the chkdsk utility on that drive. I have this message come up pretty frequently. The data may still be there and the external drive may still be functioning, but the PC does not "see" it. May not fix the problem, but worth a shot.
09-07-2008, 11:25 AM   #3
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The data is probably still there, but may require special recovery software or a data recovery service to retrieve. You can do as suggested above and run chkdsk to repair bad sectors, though I am not sure that would help make your data accessible.

If you don't need the data, you can always reformat (will likely erase the data), run chkdsk to find and mark any bad sectors, and see how it goes from there.

Steve
09-07-2008, 11:39 AM   #4
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QuoteOriginally posted by Jun Park Quote
I knew this would eventually happen; I lost one of my external backup hard drives yesterday. I fired up the backup drives and when I tried to connect to one of them, I kept getting the message "Disk is not formatted. Do you want to format now?"
But as you may have guessed, I do have multiple backups so there's no real loss other than I now have a very fancy brick sitting on my desk.

As an aside, does anyone know what could have happened to the hard drive? It is a Western Digital MyBook external drive.
Use smartmontools package to have the disk tell you what is wrong.

Thank you
Russell

09-07-2008, 11:50 AM   #5
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Thanks for all the suggestions. Well, here's another little love note I just got when I was copying the files from one of the good backups. "Unable to copy file IMG1234.pef. Cyclic redundency error" I didn't copy the message exactly so I'm paraphrasing a bit but I hope my memory is correct. So, does that mean I really should trash that backup drive as well? Or can I just run one of the suggested utility programs? Thanks again for all the help.
09-07-2008, 11:57 AM   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by Jun Park Quote
Thanks for all the suggestions. Well, here's another little love note I just got when I was copying the files from one of the good backups. "Unable to copy file IMG1234.pef. Cyclic redundency error" I didn't copy the message exactly so I'm paraphrasing a bit but I hope my memory is correct. So, does that mean I really should trash that backup drive as well? Or can I just run one of the suggested utility programs? Thanks again for all the help.
If the original drive was having issues before the backup was made, then the error could be from just bad data being read off the original disk.

Thank you
Russell
09-07-2008, 12:17 PM   #7
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May sound silly but put it in the freezer for about an hour then give a whirl. I managed to get a few last boots from dead drives that way before. Does not leave allot of time but it has enabled me to recover some data in the past.

As to what happend - man Sh*& happens - anything with moving parts will fail at some point .............thankfully you have alternative backups good for you !

09-07-2008, 01:43 PM   #8
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I had the exact same thing happen to me some years back on a secondary hard drive. I still have that drive somewhere and Im sure all of my data is still on it but Im not paying the crazy cost for data recovery. I was utterly distraught when I tried to open the drive and got 'Disk is not formatted. Do you want to format now?' utterly distraught...I feel your pain my friend, it sucks.
09-07-2008, 02:52 PM   #9
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Thanks again to all the suggestions and recommendations. Fortunately, I have neighbors in the IT field who have offered to look at the drive but I'm probably going to follow their suggestion and keep the case but replace the drive.

FYI, a USB 2.0 connection is not a really fast connection. I have about 350 GB or so on the backups and it is taking HOURS to copy all of that data onto the new drive. I thought about splurging for a firewire external drive but I thought that since I'll be using this as a "oh cr*p" backup, I don't need a fast connection. Well, watching how slowly the backup process is going brings to mind the movie "Shawshank Redemption" and a rock hammer...
09-08-2008, 04:39 AM   #10
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If you're using Windows you could try rolling back to a previous saved setup. You might have a corrupted driver or registry entry.
09-08-2008, 05:00 AM   #11
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I recently had an external drive go bad as well. In my case it was the enclosure, not the drive. It might be worth moving the drive to another enclosure just to see if it can be read. I doubt it since CRC errors are usually bad media worth a try.

Slick
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