Seagate 400GB external drive wiped data with power off????

  • Thread starter Thread starter crwng
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C

crwng

The motherboard failed on a WinXP Pro computer I own and a friend
helped me recover the data onto an external Seagate drive. He showed
me three folders he had created where the data was stored on the drive.
We then used the "remove hardware safely" tool in Windows so that the
heads would park correctly, I turned off the drive by pushing and
holding the front power button, and then I unplugged it and took it
home.

The VERY next thing I did was to first install the Bounceback Express
software on another machine, and then plug the external drive into the
machine with a USB cable. Except, the three folders that my friend had
just shown me where he had backed up my data were no longer on the
drive! Other data that I had backed up to the drive from other
computers was still there, but not these three folders.

The two drives that were backed up to the external drive were my C and
D drives. C had two partitions (one with Windows XP and one with
Windows 2000 Advanced Server) and D was a single partition holding "My
Documents". No RAID, encryption, or Windows compression was involved.
They were simply two drives holding data.

How did this backed up data just disappear like that within an hour of
backing it up, with no drive activity or power to it in between? It's
almost like the drive never had data put on it, but we both saw it with
our own eyes and browsed the folders and the files were all there.

Here are the results of the filesystem check and surface scans I
performed.

Results for volume F: (FAT32)



Volume Label: SEA_DISK

Volume Size: 399.99 GB

Some files on the volume are open. This may effect the accuracy of the
file system check and result in false errors.



The file system was checked and no problems were found.

---------------

SeaTools Online Complete Surface Scan

Started at 8:29:47 PM on 5/7/2006.



Scanning drive: Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host
Controller : Initio ST3400832A IEEE 1394 SBP2

Serial Number: &

Capacity: 400.09 GB

Scan complete. No errors were found.
 
Results for volume F: (FAT32)

Volume Label: SEA_DISK

Volume Size: 399.99 GB
Click to expand...

This is absolutely crazy - FAT32 as a single partition on a 400GB drive?

Perhaps you needed to share data with a Linux / Mac system, but FAT32 is
*not* stable on a partition that size.


Odie
 
Both the machine used to create the backup and the one used to read
the disk are running Windows XP SP2 and have NTFS formatted disks.

If I run convert f: /fs:ntfs on the external drive, will that wipe the
data or make anything inaccessible? From what I"m reading
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881/EN-US/) this seems pretty
straightforward. Do you think it would make my backed up data
accessible?
 
Both the machine used to create the backup and the one used to read
the disk are running Windows XP SP2 and have NTFS formatted disks.

If I run convert f: /fs:ntfs on the external drive, will that wipe the
data or make anything inaccessible? From what I"m reading
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881/EN-US/) this seems pretty
straightforward. Do you think it would make my backed up data
accessible?
Click to expand...
No, it won't.

If I were you, I'd download a free data recovery utility (PC Inspector,
for example) and see what sort of results you get.

If that is not successful, bear in mind that the more you "play around"
with the drive, the more you reduce the chances of a successful
recovery.

There are loads of "recovery" programs available on the net - some good,
most bad.

You need to take your chances. If your data is really valuable, send it
to a professional company. If not, try all the freeware stuff.


Odie
 
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