Nexstar Dual Bay Hard Drive Dock without format?

05
2014-04
  • user1925224

    My computer was replaced by dell. They also sent me hard drives out of the laptop. I did not want to wait for a computer store to recover my data so I bought Nexstar Dual Bay Hard Drive Dock. How can I get the data off with this? Right away it wants to format. Any way around this?

    Also, when I bring up the hard drive, format message right away.

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  • Nathan Taylor

    I've been having some weird difficulties with one of the hard drives in my system and I replaced it yesterday (warranty) in hopes I could solve them, but the problem has followed me to the new drive. Basically, Windows has been spontaneously getting I/O errors when reading from that device (internal 1TB Western Digital) and then it will mark the drive inactive and disconnect from it. When this has happened before usually all I needed was a reboot or two to be back in order, but this time it isn't working.

    Windows sees that the disk is connected (as does my other computer) but it indicates that the partition type is "RAW". If I open the disk in a utility I have (Active Kill Disk) and press "Scan" it performs a logical read of the disk and tells me that the disk is NTFS with 309gb free. Furthermore, I can see my intact file structure inside of Active Kill Disk.

    The first thing that comes to mind is that perhaps the MFT got funked up, but I'm not expert on these sorts of things and I'm dealing with 600gb of valuable data. What are some safe things I can try to get the disk properly detected again?

    Update

    I've now scanned the disk with TestDisk which also confirms the presence of my lost NTFS partition. When I attempted to do a deep scan of the drive it told me both the MFT and backup MFT were inaccessible. I'm now in the processing of copying all of the data off the disk with GetDataBack for NTFS. I wonder though if there's a less complicated fix though? One that doesn't require recreating the entire disk structure.


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  • Chris

    Have you tried connecting the drive on a different interface, or with a different cable?

    It might also be worth checking if the BIOS supports 1TB drives and whether you have the latest BIOS.

  • Hello71

    It sounds like your drive is failing. Try and use a recovery tool to get your data off of it, then scrap it. (Some ideas: http://superuser.com/questions/36340/what-to-do-with-old-hard-drives)