I'm in Hard Drive Hell!!!

lobber

Plugged in my Buffalo HD-CELU2 Drivestation at the weekend only to be greeted by a message telling me it isn't formatted and would I like to format it!!! :eek:

I have heaps of photos from travelling on this, most of which are not backed up anywhere else as well as music and movies.

I googled some data recovery companies who charge a fortune just to have a look at it, nevermind actually recovering any data. Does anyone know what I can do to recover the data on this?

qwertz

Call the friendly people at Buffalo tech support. Maybe it's something that can be fixed easily.

You could download some free or shareware disk recovery software and try to run it against the Buffalo. Alternatively, if you dare to, you could open up the Buffalo enclosure and remove the disk drive. Then connect it directly to a SATA port in your PC and try the recovery software.

lobber

qwertz wrote: »

Call the friendly people at Buffalo tech support. Maybe it's something that can be fixed easily.

You could download some free or shareware disk recovery software and try to run it against the Buffalo. Alternatively, if you dare to, you could open up the Buffalo enclosure and remove the disk drive. Then connect it directly to a SATA port in your PC and try the recovery software.

The friendly people at Buffalo gave the options
1) go ahead and format the drive and start over
2)void my warranty by having it opened up to recover the data

What use is a warranty if it doesn't apply to data recovery?!!!

Capt'n Midnight

lobber wrote: »

What use is a warranty if it doesn't apply to data recovery?!!!

hard drives have a 1% a year failure rate , something that hasn't gotten better in the last 25 years


All of the hardware sellers have the same attitude to data recovery, you wouldn't need data recovery if you had bought duplicate or better still triplicate drives and backup media.

try booting from a linux boot disk, windows gets very confused with corrupted software, if you removed the drive without shutting it down properly then you might just have software corruption


if the drive is making clunk - click type noises then it may be dead

if the drive is not making noises try photorec , there is a testdisk option there that will recover corrupt partitions, but it is real kill or cure stuff

photorec will recover pictures if the drive is not damaged, you would need a lot of space, and it won't recover the filenames


question is which is more valuable, the disk or the data on it ??
proper data recovery off the surface of the drive costs €100's

DannyBuoy

An external drive is only as good as its backup. You may get 1 year or 5 years. Thats the lesson I've learnt recently. Lost about 600GB of music and films. With 1TB drives costing about E90 I think its a good idea to have 2, and have the same on each, thats not a big job.
I've found its not if it fails, its when...

DublinWriter

lobber wrote: »

Does anyone know what I can do to recover the data on this?

Check out the Buffalo tech support message board and you'll find plenty of disgruntled customers with similar problems. It all seems to be down their newer and 'cheaper' products having buggy firmware.

Buffalo tech support are pretty useless, they'll either recommend you send it back (it will be reformatted) or they'll suggest you reformat it yourself.

After using Buffalo products for many happy years, I bought a 4TB Buffalo Linkstation last December.

It's been nothing but trouble and has corrupted itself TWICE since I bought it.

I've got the gruesome job of trying to reconstruct its 4-Disk XFS formatted RAID0 array on another 8TB NAS ahead this week.

Your Buffalo unit is either FAT32/NTFS, so you could take it out of it's casing, plug it directly into your PC and use a recovery tool like RTools to try and recover your files.

PM me if you're really stuck, but give RTools a try yourself.

kaizersoze

lobber wrote: »

The friendly people at Buffalo gave the options
What use is a warranty if it doesn't apply to data recovery?!!!

Because it's your data and your responsibility to keep it backed up. Not the manufacturers. Wrt the problem, even accepting it's offer to format it's unlikely to make the drive usuable again. Sounds like it's faulty.

Download BartPE and burn it to a cd. Boot from it with the Buffalo attached and see if you can access your files.

Nate--IRL--

I've just rescued 350gb of data intact overnight with this.. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Give it a go, it's free.

Nate