External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ernest
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Ernest

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Hey Everyone,
So I know I pulled a bonehead move, but here's what happened. I
reinstalled XP x64 last night because I went from an old small SATA I hdd to
a new large SATA II hdd. I have an external 500GB hdd (generic enclosure +
seagate hdd) that I used as a backup drive. Every night, Cobian Backup would
push differential backups to the external hdd. When I put in the new hdd and
did the fresh install, I forgot to unplug the external hdd, and although I
did not touch the partitioning on the external (only the new internal drive),
the install seems to have somehow corrupted my external drive. I am getting
a slew of event ID 51, 31 and 11 (basically saying that the file system on
the external hdd is trashed.) So I tried several times to chkdsk it and
every time it got a little farther and finally just froze at stage 5. I got
some error along the lines of not enough room to fix it. Now only half of
that hdd is used (and I know that for a fact.) So my question to the
community is: What should be my next step to recover the data on that drive?
Device manager sees the disk as available and healthy. I can open and
browse the directories. When I try to copy files to my main hdd I get an
error that windows cannot read the source. I'm hoping that there is a way
that I can fix the file system and recover my data. Both the internal and
external hdds are NTFS formatted.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
 
Re: External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

How critical is your data? There are third parties that will recover data
off of drives in far worse shape than yours.

I'd start by imaging what you have before you do anything else. Once you
have an image, you can try to recover/repair because you always have a
fallback position. But trying to repair something that is your only copy of
essential information is a very bad idea until you get it copied.

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel


"Ernest" <Ernest@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:C7A775D0-C434-499F-8F8D-2DF6D875A13F@microsoft.com...
> Hey Everyone,
> So I know I pulled a bonehead move, but here's what happened. I
> reinstalled XP x64 last night because I went from an old small SATA I hdd
> to
> a new large SATA II hdd. I have an external 500GB hdd (generic enclosure
> +
> seagate hdd) that I used as a backup drive. Every night, Cobian Backup
> would
> push differential backups to the external hdd. When I put in the new hdd
> and
> did the fresh install, I forgot to unplug the external hdd, and although I
> did not touch the partitioning on the external (only the new internal
> drive),
> the install seems to have somehow corrupted my external drive. I am
> getting
> a slew of event ID 51, 31 and 11 (basically saying that the file system on
> the external hdd is trashed.) So I tried several times to chkdsk it and
> every time it got a little farther and finally just froze at stage 5. I
> got
> some error along the lines of not enough room to fix it. Now only half of
> that hdd is used (and I know that for a fact.) So my question to the
> community is: What should be my next step to recover the data on that
> drive?
> Device manager sees the disk as available and healthy. I can open and
> browse the directories. When I try to copy files to my main hdd I get an
> error that windows cannot read the source. I'm hoping that there is a way
> that I can fix the file system and recover my data. Both the internal and
> external hdds are NTFS formatted.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks!
 
Re: External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

Make sure that your driveletters didn't change during that install, and that
the backup isn't trying to recover from the wrong partition!


Tony. . .
 
RE: External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

The data is not 'critical' per se, and I typically burn the 'critical' data
to dvd rom every 3 months, so it's not like its the end of the world. I can
go and re-download most of the data, but it will take a long time. More than
a nuisance than anything. I'm glad that I offsite data every three months to
Texas from California. I was just hoping to avoid the hassle of
redownloading all the stuff I had...4GB of 250GB is critical, and that is on
DVD already. the other 246GB is not critical but definitely used regularly.
 
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