Chkdsk returns "Unable to determine volume version and state"

September 2, 2007

I don't think there's any silver bullet out there, but I thought I'd

ask....

My WD2500 gets a "pass" on the quick data lifeguard diagnostics,

reports as healthy by the OS (XP), has the correct size, but it's

blank where it should say "NTFS". And chkdsk returns the "unable to

determine volume..." message. I'm trying not to reformat and loose

the data.

After reading quite a few usenet posts like mine, I see a few "you

might try software X", but no one is saying "software X worked for

me", which is why I think I might be hosed. But if someone has an

approach to get the data back, I'd like to hear it. Thanks.

--Dale--

PS: Here are the symptoms I saw that lead to the problem. This drive

was in a slave in a machine, working fine. I moved it to an all-SATA

Dell E521, so I had to use one of those SATA to IDE boards that plug

into the back of the drive. The drive came right up in the new

machine that day, but a few days later I noticed it was really slow

coming out of hibernate. And the next day I noticed the drive didn't

register in XP. A reboot "solved" that. Then the following day I got

a "Windows Delayed Write Failed - Windows was unable to save all the

data for the file G:\$Mft. The data has been lost." I ran chkdsk /f

on it and had all of my data again! But the next day the drive letter

was gone again. Thinking the problem might be the SATA to IDE board,

I pulled the drive out of the Dell and put it back in the old machine

(without the SATA adapter), but the same "unable to determine

volume.." message showed there as well. I installed the western

digital diagnostics (WinDLG) on that machine, ran them, and the drive

passed the scan and the short test.

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