HDD Magic

[castlefo]

My external HDD a seagate 7200 rpm 1Tb just pulled a Houdini reappearing stunt. It contains home videos family pics and my entire steam game library "games are stored on this hdd not played"

i turned on my hdd and after a bout 15 sec i get an error message saying the drive cant be accessed until it has been formatted i have encountered this before and found that if i change the external cage i can access the drive to back up any new data before formatting the drive. I plugged in my hdd and turned it on now i cam view the data on the drive but noting else pics and videos don't open file and folders can't be moved so i formatted it after it finishes i try to access it but i get an error that states the drive is no longer located in this directory and it does not eject so i force disconnect it   and reconnect it and all my data is back and fully functioning. anyone have an explanation for this.

[Frankie]

I've seen PC's do stuff, that no way in hell they were supposed to do... so....

 

[EvilLemur]

this could happen on two occasions 1 the hard drive has a SMART failure and it it stopping windows from reading the hard drive ( usually happens when you drop a hard drive) and 2 the MBR may be corrupt or need to be fixed, windows couldn't read or write to it so it says you need to format the drive ( i just unplug it and plug it in until it reads it )

 

i would suggest running something like Activesmart to see if they hard drive has any Smart failures that could shed some light on the situation, if not then it could just be a simple fact that windows is having issues with the hard drive so you could run maybe a checkdisk in your cmd to see if that pulls anything up.

[castlefo]

this could happen on two occasions 1 the hard drive has a SMART failure and it it stopping windows from reading the hard drive ( usually happens when you drop a hard drive) and 2 the MBR may be corrupt or need to be fixed, windows couldn't read or write to it so it says you need to format the drive ( i just unplug it and plug it in until it reads it )

 

i would suggest running something like Activesmart to see if they hard drive has any Smart failures that could shed some light on the situation, if not then it could just be a simple fact that windows is having issues with the hard drive so you could run maybe a checkdisk in your cmd to see if that pulls anything up.

Thnx I checked into the SMART failure doesn't seem to be a problem i was asking if any one knew why my data reappeared after formatting the drive sorry if i was unclear on that

[ionbasa]

Thnx I checked into the SMART failure doesn't seem to be a problem i was asking if any one knew why my data reappeared after formatting the drive sorry if i was unclear on that

If you format the drive, all data doesn't disappear. A format usually involves just writing a new filesystem over the old one. Technically most of the binary 1s and 0s are still present on the drive platter, but the OS will ignore these values and just write over them. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_(computing)#Reformatting

 

What I would personally do is try to backup all the data on the drive using TestDisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

TestDisk is an open source utility that is run from the command line. Use it to backup all or most of your data off of you drive.

 

Next I would use a linux distribution to wipe the drive clean by writing 0s over all existing data. An guide on how to do so can be found here: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/low-level-formatting.html

After wiping the drive I would let windows reformat the drive to NTFS or ExFAT depending on your scenario.