external hard-drive broken/corrupt?

[nicK]

i bought the 250gig external hd Lidl were doing a few months. (targa databox 250.. i think it's a western digital 250g drive it the case)

it's served me well since i got it, up until my younger brother accidently dropped it last week.
at the minute, it powers up fine but won't show up on my system so i can't access it.
i don't think the hard drive itself is completely dead because for a couple of days after the drop, it showed up every so often on my system. so i'm wondering if it could be the case that's the problem?

i got a lot of the important information off the hard-drive as soon as the drop happened for fear something like this might happen. but there's still a lot of stuff (250gigs after all) on there that i'd like to transfer or recover.
are there "back-doors" to doing this kind of thing, or is it all gone forever?

Infini

Can't you salvage the harddrive itself and try putting it into your computer as an internal? There could also be a loose wire inside it as well.

[nicK]

sure, i could remove the hard-drive easily enough but at the minute i only have 2laptops, so it'll be a week or two before i could try that.. any other ideas?

[nicK]

ok, i've tried to set it up as a slave drive on a different pc but the pc wouldn't recognise it, not even in bios.
then i set it up as master and the bios surprisingly recognised it. huray i thought. so i ran Ubuntu (an os running from cd rom) and tried to salvage the content by burning it all onto cd's, only ubuntu wouldn't recognise the drive when it loaded..

are there any other ways of getting the stuff off?
i don't want to have to fork out a grand to send it to a hard-drive recovery centre
any ideas at all?

SwampThing

What file system was on it?

[nicK]

dunno, but i'm sure it was the default... that's NTSC right? why..

RicardoSmith

[nicK] wrote:

dunno, but i'm sure it was the default... that's NTSC right? why..

The file format is NTFS. NTSC is a US TV format. As far as I know only the latest distros can see NTFS. But if you can see the disk them maybe its ok. I know that I've had problem with some USB disks and I've always managed to recover them, after I've run some check on the disk, like CHKDSK etc. Once I had to recover the MBR using some freeware tool I found on the web.

snappieT

NTSC is the american TV method

You mean NTFS (network terminal file system afaik)

leeroybrown

snapscan1212p wrote:

You mean NTFS (network terminal file system afaik)

You're probably getting mixed up with NFS (the Network File System) here. Afaik, NTFS originates from 'NT File System' as it originated with Windows NT where the NT stood for 'New Technology'.

As regards recovering the data. Put the HDD back in the PC and boot Ubuntu again. You can check the 'dmesg' to see if drive was detected, use 'fdisk' to see it's partition structure and should be able to mount any NTFS partitions with 'mount -t ntfs /dev/hdXn /mnt/whatever'. I havn't used the Ubuntu LiveCD but I'd guess it might create automatic fstab entries and mount points for each detected partition by default.

If that still doesn't work download Western Digital's drive test utility (it will let you make a boot floppy) from their site and use it to check the drive.

If the drive is fine then I suggest you take a look at the USB case for any damage. The electronics inside should be relatively simple (excluding the IDE to USB bridge which should be a self contained unit) so you might be able to spot a loose connection.

SwampThing

If it's an NTFS file system, wouldn't it be a simpler job to put it into an XP/2000 machine temporarily - at least it rules out file system compatability issues.

[nicK]

leeroybrown wrote:

As regards recovering the data. Put the HDD back in the PC and boot Ubuntu again. You can check the 'dmesg' to see if drive was detected, use 'fdisk' to see it's partition structure and should be able to mount any NTFS partitions with 'mount -t ntfs /dev/hdXn /mnt/whatever'. I havn't used the Ubuntu LiveCD but I'd guess it might create automatic fstab entries and mount points for each detected partition by default.

hey, thanks for replying, but i've tried all of the above and it still won't access the drive.

If it's an NTFS file system, wouldn't it be a simpler job to put it into an XP/2000 machine temporarily - at least it rules out file system compatability issues.

as i've said, it won't work as a slave drive, so i can't put it onto a system with xp/2000 because then i'd have to set it to slave..

is there a compatibility issue regarding the file systems? ntfs vrs the ubuntu live cd?
this may sound stuppid, but are there any "windows" on the fly cd's that i could also try out?

or has anyone else got any ideas?

SwampThing

nick, if it's detected as a master, there's no reason it won't detect as a slave.

I'm sure everyone here who's ever put a HDD in a PC's had some experience of 'what the f..' when something like this happens.

Try all the usual things - disconnect every other ide device except the master & slave drives.
Another thing - if it detects as a master, put it as a master drive on the secondary ide controller and boot from primary.