Firewire Drive Failure?

[Tazman]

Hey all!

Here's the deal.

My brother has 3 firewire drives daisy-chained. We had a power failure yesterday while all three drives were on.

The drive in question (the other two are fine) is a 80GB Western Digital drive. He had about 76GB of that filled with data. I can't access the drive in Windows Explorer (see attachment). XP disk management "see's" it and reports it as healthy but no file system (the drive is formatted as NTFS) . The 76GB of data is there, just not being reconized.

I d/l'ed WD Diagnostics and it reported the drive was fine.

Now what? It appears that something happened to the file table and I'm a bit confuzed as to how to repair it and with which proggie.

Any help recovering my brothers p0rn, er, data would save him from a coranary.

TIA!

Mike

[Whir]

Try taking the HD out of the FireWire bay and sticking it in the computer? Maybe the problem isn't the hard drive, but the FW bay. Just a suggestion.

[Tazman]

Thanks Whir.

I didn't go that far..yet .

Something happened to the MFT. I haven't been able to repair it but I was able to see it in Partition Magic and copy the partition to another drive.

When that's done, I guess it'll be a format .

Mike

[Xtreeme]

Well could have been worse I guess. My one drive died right after a power outtage and I am on a great power strip. Everything else was OK but the ONE hdd died. I think it was cause it powered down then up really quick (though I have resume on power failure OFF in bios)??? My thought was the head crashed cause it made a real chattery sound after that and it dropped 3 no 4 ah 2days later 10 sectors and kept rising. I returned it and they swapped me for a larger one. Could have been worse in yer case I guess. Like new hardware time. But all that porn! DOnt let it go to waiste 70 some gigs. thats quit a collection there. He must be single-har har.

[barjammar]

Hi,
I am having the same problem. I just reinstalled windows XP pro onto a new C-drive. I have the old c and d drives available on the old IDE chain.

Problem is that two maxtor firewire external drives are not showing up as drives and only one of them is showing up as an unpartitioned drive in the manage area.

I doubt that they are corrupt because they were just disconnected while we reinstalled XP. But I dont want to go into the partitioning and format program from manage because they have stuff on them.

I am plugging the firewaire externals into another PC to see if they are OK.....
Hmm.. seems to be the same on my Vaio too! Could the maxtor one-touch button have some weird effect?


(sweat!)The drive info is here:

[Tazman]

Welcome to TechIMO barjammar!

Since both drives are doing the same on two computers, I would begin to look at the externals to make sure they are not the problem. Disconnect them from the computers, and "un"daisy-chain them from each other.

Plug one drive into a computer that is known free of virus' / trojans. Perferably not either your XP box or Sony (XP?) but a different computer the drive hasn't ever been plugged into. What happens? Is it reconized? Do the same with the other drive. If you don't have access to another computer with a firwire port, run all of Windows and A/V updates first and try it on the box with the fresh install of XP, again, one at a time so as not to confuse XP.

If the drive(s) are still showing up as unpartitioned, the problem may be that a third party ap was used to partiton the drives. Maxtor doesn't usually do this but I can't confirm that on the one-button backup models.

Also, make sure that both computers can beat the 137GB barrier.

If you still are having problems, the latest version of Partition Magic may repair the partitions. Before trying that, to get your data off the old drive, use R-Studio to recover the data to a different drive. I used that proggie to recover the entire 60GB (it was full). The process took quite a bit of time, the programs interface a bit daunting for the non-geek, but it recovered every file.

Mike

[barjammar]

Thanks for the tip.

I may buy R-studio. I conected the 80G drive to the IDE chain but still no obvious active partitions. I will see if I can get partition magic onto it - I have a clean Win 2000 system to try it with.

Barry