i h8 hard drives

[ASTG]

so on saturday i bought a wd my book essential edition hard drive from orifice works, it was a sweet deal, 1tb for 170, never thought id see a price like that, unfortunately it worked for one night then the nex day it didnt, i dunno why, only thing i can think of is i plugged it into my media centre, its a small linux box built specially to sit nex to a tv, works well, but i plugged in the hard drive and it didnt show on the linux, then it wouldnt show on my laptop (running windows vista)

in disk manager i can see the drive, however it says

Disk 2
Unknown
Unreadable

ummm this looks bad, im inclined to save myself some trouble and exchange it for a new one, however i did put some videos on the drive and i would like to recover them, any way i can do this?

[Randy]

What part of the system can see the hard drives. Does the BIOS see it?

[ASTG]

umm i dunno, how do i know if the bios can see it

basically it does not show up in my computer, or programs such as active undelete, but it does show up in disk manager, however in disk manager it just gives me that unknown unreadable thing

[MeanDean]

Did you format it with a Windows or Linux file-system?

[Randy]

There are many possible reasons for not being able to see a hard drive. for all intents and purposes, with updated linux and modern windows, all major file systems can read each other. If it can't read it, its either in an obscure format or its corrupted. If you stick to NTFS that doesn't happen. NTFS is atomic, so no corrupt changes can stick. (that's theory, it happens though, but far less often than it used to)

The disk can corrupt at many points (various points fail at various stages), but if the bios can still read it, you can still use it. The bios tells you all this on startup (its called POST). Alternitivly, it'll be in the bios menu's... in the bit where you turn off the floppy disk.

If its a new disk and you have no data on it that you want, then you need to repartition the disk. fdisk was an old dos tool that we used to use, but now you can use the windows disk manager. (format generally formats logical partitions, not necessarily physical drives)

Right click on the disk and select delete volume. Then create a new partition on the disk the size of the disk and format it in NTFS (modern linux can read it). That should get it back.

Otherwise, fdisk still works on logical and phyical drives as long as dos can see them. you could use that to repartition the disk.

[MeanDean]

Vista doesn't read ext3 drives without 3rd party drivers. Also, I know it isn't the same thing, but it is a storage device, I had a sshd that died but still would get detected as a hard drive. I was able to use filesystem recovery tools to recover it a few times before it was entirely dead. I wouldn't give up on the files but look at either attempting a recovery of the filesystem or investigate tools to recover the partition table in case that is a problem, before formatting but I wouldn't format either if that was all you ended up being all you could do with it, but take it back like you said. Better to swap it out than to still be wondering a year from now if its going to have an early death.

[Randy]

RE changing hard drives. Harddrives are finite. They will all fail. On average every 2-4 years of operational use. binning the drive because its failed once is not all that rational. Everything in your computer fails all the time. there are just checks to find the fault and correct it. If the HDD's MBR is corrupted, then no software or hardware can fix it on the fly. All harddrives suffer from this deficiency.

I say, bin it if it fails again.

RE recovery tools, there are forensic tool on the market to recover corrupted and/or deleted and/or partial files. Most depend on your ability to read the disk. There are ways to reset the MBR to become readable, but that's some advanced sh*t. (involving copying the MBR of an exact same drive onto the damaged drives MBR, and removing platters from the damaged disk and changing them with a healthy disk of the exact same make and model). Digital forensics personnel and data recovery personnel charge thousands for such efforts (just to indicate the effort and complexity involved)