Hi all of you sexy Clixsensers.

Damn, i have 1.8 TB of lovely movies and series on a Samsung external hard-drive, And i can't access it anymore as it's most likely corrupted.

I've been troubleshotting my usb ports, tried updating all my drivers (Including reinstalling them) and ran chkdsk from the command prompt in an attempt to fix it, Sadly to no avail as it somehow get's stuck at stage 2 (took only 3 hours to find out).

It's shown under devices and printers and it also shows up in device management under disk-drives, Which probably means that it's the hard-drive that's faulty and not a windows bug/error.

Can any of you recommend a good recovery-program you've had a good experience with?

I need that data back or i'll be crying for the next 3 months , Yesterday i even looked out the window (It was scary)


Tried asking microsoft community, And as usual they don't know anything

Oh no! You looked outside? That's terrible! I hope you can find a way to fix that soon or you might have to... GO OUTSIDE! Say it ain't so!

Something with a pretty UI that's easy to use, I have no idea, but you should try to find one of those if you don't know what you're doing. After you've done that and it's failed (or if you do know what you're doing) try the low level advanced tools at CGSecurity - Data recovery: TestDisk & PhotoRec

Hope you've just lost a partition table and testdisk can save it.

If you haven't lost a partition table, and testdisk can't save it, photorec will recover anything that is still readable on the drive.

Testdisk is the dangerous one - it writes partition tables and actually makes changes to the disk. If it works, it recovers everything easily, but if it doesn't, you can make things worse - that's why I said to use something else with a pretty UI that you can't screw up first.

Photorec is safe, it doesn't write to the disk so it can't screw anything up, but it's the tool of last resort - it loses filenames and directory structures, and recovers everything that can still be read. Everything. You'll probably get most of your films back, but you might end up with gigabytes of temporary internet files from a browsing session ten years ago to sort through too.

Hi Bouldrake (Long time no see).

I do know a lot of tech stuff, But on this i'm on low ground.

The damn thing is that it suddenly stopped working with no warning or anything, i've tested it through all my usb-ports on both win 7 and 10, In win 7 it shows the drive under computer/Devicemanager/Devices and printers but is not accessible and throws me 2 warnings.

J:\ is not accessible
Data error (Cyclic Redundancy check)


And the other one is.

You need to format the disk in drive J: before
you can use it.


Strange thing is that under properties/general the drive shows it has 0 bytes in both used and free space, It really shouldn't and has me a little worried.

Thank's for your answer Bouldrake, It's probably pretty messed up since chkdsk (As admin) got stuck on stage 2.

your external hard drive is most likely fine since operating system is recognising it(better to check through BIOS)

if drive is readable and files are still there , files should be accessible through a software called Iso buster

try to explore the drive through the software, see if u can access the drive..

That would normally indicate hardware failure, though there are three more things I can think of to try...

Have you tried changing the USB cable? You said you'd tried the ports, but not the cable. If it's a thin cable, also make sure it's straight. I have a Seagate that played up for months until I finally discovered it just didn't like it's cable being bent too much.

Did chkdsk actually fail, or did you give up? It can take a VERY long time. If you gave up, rather than chkdsk giving up, try again, but do it overnight while you're asleep.

And you could try mounting it from a Linux live CD. NTFS is fully supported on Linux now, but it didn't work properly for years and years, so it's got a whole bunch of error handling and fault tolerance that Windows doesn't. If you get a live CD of Ubuntu, Knoppix, DamnSmallLinux or something like that and boot from that, you might still be able to mount your drive and backup your files. Whether it mounts in Linux or not, as long as it's detected, fdisk may still be able to fix it. For NTFS and FAT drives, it's not as complete as chkdsk, but it works orders of magnitude faster.

If none of those things work, you're looking at photorec.

Oh, and also, check the SMART with smartmontools. It'll confirm whether your disk is dead/dying or not (if your disk supports SMART, most do these days)
Download – smartmontools

Quote:Dang!! My External hard-drive is corrupted.

Good job Niko!

Ha ha, Clixsense forum offers better support than the microsoft community.

The partition is also recognised in bios.

i have one laptop with win 7 and one with win 10, On windows 7 i can explore it with a right click (But i can't access it), But on windows 10 it makes the screen go black until i pull the usb from the port.

Iso buster and photorec seems like 2 good options.

Thank's for the suggestions.

BouldRake wrote: That would normally indicate hardware failure, though there are three more things I can think of to try...

Have you tried changing the USB cable? You said you'd tried the ports, but not the cable. If it's a thin cable, also make sure it's straight. I have a Seagate that played up for months until I finally discovered it just didn't like it's cable being bent too much.

Did chkdsk actually fail, or did you give up? It can take a VERY long time. If you gave up, rather than chkdsk giving up, try again, but do it overnight while you're asleep.

And you could try mounting it from a Linux live CD. NTFS is fully supported on Linux now, but it didn't work properly for years and years, so it's got a whole bunch of error handling and fault tolerance that Windows doesn't. If you get a live CD of Ubuntu, Knoppix, DamnSmallLinux or something like that and boot from that, you might still be able to mount your drive and backup your files. Whether it mounts in Linux or not, as long as it's detected, fdisk may still be able to fix it. For NTFS and FAT drives, it's not as complete as chkdsk, but it works orders of magnitude faster.

If none of those things work, you're looking at photorec.

Have you tried changing the USB cable?

ha ha ha, Thank's for that reminder.

you know what?, As i pulled the cable from my external drive a little piece of blue plastic fell out.

I think i need to look for a replacement cable.

thank's Bouldrake, You've been super helpful

CroqueMitaine wrote:

Quote:Dang!! My External hard-drive is corrupted.

Good job Niko!

Thanks that's very nice of you (In a french way of course)

On the positive side, if you can't fix the corruption, then your computer can always get a job as a politician