External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

[Guest Ernest]

Hey Everyone,

So I know I pulled a bonehead move, but here's what happened. I

reinstalled XP x64 last night because I went from an old small SATA I hdd to

a new large SATA II hdd. I have an external 500GB hdd (generic enclosure +

seagate hdd) that I used as a backup drive. Every night, Cobian Backup would

push differential backups to the external hdd. When I put in the new hdd and

did the fresh install, I forgot to unplug the external hdd, and although I

did not touch the partitioning on the external (only the new internal drive),

the install seems to have somehow corrupted my external drive. I am getting

a slew of event ID 51, 31 and 11 (basically saying that the file system on

the external hdd is trashed.) So I tried several times to chkdsk it and

every time it got a little farther and finally just froze at stage 5. I got

some error along the lines of not enough room to fix it. Now only half of

that hdd is used (and I know that for a fact.) So my question to the

community is: What should be my next step to recover the data on that drive?

Device manager sees the disk as available and healthy. I can open and

browse the directories. When I try to copy files to my main hdd I get an

error that windows cannot read the source. I'm hoping that there is a way

that I can fix the file system and recover my data. Both the internal and

external hdds are NTFS formatted.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks!

[Guest Charlie Russel - MVP]

Re: External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

 

How critical is your data? There are third parties that will recover data

off of drives in far worse shape than yours.

 

I'd start by imaging what you have before you do anything else. Once you

have an image, you can try to recover/repair because you always have a

fallback position. But trying to repair something that is your only copy of

essential information is a very bad idea until you get it copied.

 

--

Charlie.

http://msmvps.com/xperts64

http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel

 

 

"Ernest" <Ernest@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

news:C7A775D0-C434-499F-8F8D-2DF6D875A13F@microsoft.com...

> Hey Everyone,

> So I know I pulled a bonehead move, but here's what happened. I

> reinstalled XP x64 last night because I went from an old small SATA I hdd

> to

> a new large SATA II hdd. I have an external 500GB hdd (generic enclosure

> +

> seagate hdd) that I used as a backup drive. Every night, Cobian Backup

> would

> push differential backups to the external hdd. When I put in the new hdd

> and

> did the fresh install, I forgot to unplug the external hdd, and although I

> did not touch the partitioning on the external (only the new internal

> drive),

> the install seems to have somehow corrupted my external drive. I am

> getting

> a slew of event ID 51, 31 and 11 (basically saying that the file system on

> the external hdd is trashed.) So I tried several times to chkdsk it and

> every time it got a little farther and finally just froze at stage 5. I

> got

> some error along the lines of not enough room to fix it. Now only half of

> that hdd is used (and I know that for a fact.) So my question to the

> community is: What should be my next step to recover the data on that

> drive?

> Device manager sees the disk as available and healthy. I can open and

> browse the directories. When I try to copy files to my main hdd I get an

> error that windows cannot read the source. I'm hoping that there is a way

> that I can fix the file system and recover my data. Both the internal and

> external hdds are NTFS formatted.

>

> Any suggestions?

>

> Thanks!

[Guest Tony Sperling]

Re: External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

 

Make sure that your driveletters didn't change during that install, and that

the backup isn't trying to recover from the wrong partition!

 

 

Tony. . .

[Guest Ernest]

RE: External Hard Drive problems after fresh install

 

The data is not 'critical' per se, and I typically burn the 'critical' data

to dvd rom every 3 months, so it's not like its the end of the world. I can

go and re-download most of the data, but it will take a long time. More than

a nuisance than anything. I'm glad that I offsite data every three months to

Texas from California. I was just hoping to avoid the hassle of

redownloading all the stuff I had...4GB of 250GB is critical, and that is on

DVD already. the other 246GB is not critical but definitely used regularly.