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Hi,
I have a USB drive that suddenly won't be recognized again.
Whenever I plug it into a pc Windows says the drive isn't formatted.
Linux doesn't even recognize it.
According to some diagnostic tool I downloaded the boot sector/mbr has been damaged, but the data still exists.
Is there any way to fix this?
Who is the manufacturer of the USB? This sounds like a problem I am having with my Western Digital USB drive.Quote:
Originally Posted by vbcode1980
Edit:
The problem I have was that the system detected that drive was installed/connected to the computer. However, I could not view the files on the drive whenever I opened "my computer" or Windows Explorer the usb drive would not appear even though it was plugged-in.
Found this Backup and Restore Master Boot Record (MBR) of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) I will give it a try if I find my usb drive.
Failing that you could try creating a usb MBR.
or
http://www.techsupportforum.com/hard...usb-drive.html
Quote:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk.
Here are the steps I followed to recover the situation:
1) Download the Test Disk utility
2) Connected the USB Drive to my laptop. (windows kindly offered to reformat the drive as the previous operation had failed... I obviously decilned :-)
3) Ran the TestDisk program and select Analyse disk... takes about 15minutes
4) The analysis results indicated the data was intact but the MBR (aka Master Boot Record) had been deleted.
The TestDisk message went something like "the extrapolated boot record does not match the current boot record"
5) Selected "Rebuild MBR"
6) Selected "Write Boot"
7) Selected "list" (which lists files and folders)
It's Maxtor drive.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nightwalker83
Thanks, I'll give it a try.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nightwalker83
I believe I already tried the TestDisk program. When trying to rebuild the MBR it gave an error about not being able to read a sector or something...
I have an 180GB+ desktop drive that I use for backup, from tomorrow will be three years since I got it, has not malfunctioned in that time. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by vbcode1980
From experience and other people who have the smaller (pocket) usb drives they are constantly failing. I had mine for about 6 months before I could no longer access it.
This is a 500 GB desktop drive. Never had any problems with it, had it for 2 years now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nightwalker83
I'll try out your suggestions when I get home.
if it's a desktop drive, i fixed one of those once by installing it as a slave in a 2nd computer. windows automatically repaired it while booting.
If you have never had a hard drive fail, you are lucky. I bought a 500gb one two months ago with a 5 year manufacturer's warranty. It's at the manufacturer right now trying go get my data off of it.
At work we had used some products from http://www.partition-recovery.com/ once.
I used those to get my data back.
Active@ Partition Recovery was able to read the drive, distinguish the partitions, and create an image.
Active@ File Recovery was able to open that image and save the files from it.
It took quite a while, though.
(6 hours just to read every sector of the drive, 6 more to create the image, another 6 to get the data from the image again :) )