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Hard drive with music files suddenly shows "Not Formatted"

post #1 of 19
3/13/09 at 4:07pm
Thread Starter 
My external 2.5" USB drive with bunch of music and movie files suddenly is not being recognized by my computer. Multiple computers are now giving me the message, "This drive is not formatted. Would you like to format it?"

Did my drive basically bite the dust?
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post #2 of 19
3/13/09 at 4:12pm
The partition could be corrupt, I've had that with a couple of USB drives -reason why I don't use USB for important data.

Can you see the drive/partition within disk managment? Try taking it out of the USB enclosure and using a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor, perhaps the USB chipset is faulty- but the drive is working.
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post #3 of 19
3/13/09 at 4:19pm
what drive is it?

and did you have your music stored else where?
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post #4 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:19pm
Doesn't sound good. You probably lost it, unless you take it to a disk expert that can scan it or use other tools to recover it.

The moral of the story is: If you have thousands of disks and countless hours of ripping at stake, invest in a good RAID system. I'll be offering one soon BTW.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
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post #5 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:29pm
Thread Starter 
I do have backup files.

After further research, the most likely scenario seemed to be partition corruption on my USB drive. A program that is reported to help by some people is Partition Recovery, so I've downloaded a free demo version from here:

Active@ Partition Recovery.Restoring lost partition.Recovering MBR.

I'm in the middle of the "superscan" now, which is taking forever, but it's definitely detecting many "bad sectors" in my partition already. I just hope it can recover them after the scan...

I'm thinking I need e-SATA or Firewire external drive next time if this partition corruption thing is a USB-drive thing.

BTW. Even if I'm unable to recover data, can I still use this USB drive if I "format it" like my computer wants to?
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post #6 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:40pm
Take it out of the caddy first connect directly to computers internal controllers. I'd had bad luck with USB enclosures.
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post #7 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:40pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by audioengr View Post
Doesn't sound good. You probably lost it, unless you take it to a disk expert that can scan it or use other tools to recover it.

The moral of the story is: If you have thousands of disks and countless hours of ripping at stake, invest in a good RAID system. I'll be offering one soon BTW.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
RAID is not the solution to this problem. Backups are the solution. RAID is NOT backups!
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post #8 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:45pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon L View Post
I do have backup files.

After further research, the most likely scenario seemed to be partition corruption on my USB drive. A program that is reported to help by some people is Partition Recovery, so I've downloaded a free demo version from here:

Active@ Partition Recovery.Restoring lost partition.Recovering MBR.

I'm in the middle of the "superscan" now, which is taking forever, but it's definitely detecting many "bad sectors" in my partition already. I just hope it can recover them after the scan...

I'm thinking I need e-SATA or Firewire external drive next time if this partition corruption thing is a USB-drive thing.

BTW. Even if I'm unable to recover data, can I still use this USB drive if I "format it" like my computer wants to?
Bad sectors are not usually caused by the interface (in this case USB). Bad sectors are usually caused by a drive not able to write data properly to the drive, ie it thinks it wrote the data but in fact the data did not get written completely. While the drive may be able to mark the bad sectors and move on, all modern drives do this even without your knowledge. However if you suffer a large number of bad sectors then that is most likely a bad sign for that drive and I would just trash it once all data I wanted and could retrieve was off. No sense wasting time on it when drives are so cheap.
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post #9 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:45pm
depends on what type of raid - raid 0 effectively doubles the speed of your harddrive by spreading data across two or more disks. but if one disk goes, you've had it.

raid 5 (might be wrong about the numbers) copies your data across two or more harddrives, so if one goes you still have the other.

i have a western digital passport drive, that's usb. opening it up i get a regular laptop 2.5 inch harddrive - try that, see if it makes a difference.
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post #10 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:55pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiggy Fuzz View Post
depends on what type of raid - raid 0 effectively doubles the speed of your harddrive by spreading data across two or more disks. but if one disk goes, you've had it.

raid 5 (might be wrong about the numbers) copies your data across two or more harddrives, so if one goes you still have the other.

i have a western digital passport drive, that's usb. opening it up i get a regular laptop 2.5 inch harddrive - try that, see if it makes a difference.
NO IT DOES NOT DEPEND. RAID is NOT BACKUPS.

If you or a program deletes data from your RAID array can you retrieve it? (without hack the filesystem lookup table).
If the RAID controller fails in a lovely way and writes corrupted data, can you retrieve it? (This happens more than you would think, even with high-end server class hardware.)

Another issue with RAID, particularly RAID5 is that when a drive fails RAID 5 still works but in a reduced state. So you pop in a new drive and it starts to rebuild the array. This can take a good bit of time depending on the # of drives and load on the system. Since most people have arrays of similiar age drives and the drives have similar load history, it is not surprising that large array (# of disks) suffer second drive failure during the rebuild of the failed drive. Guess what happens when the second drive fails, no more data! RAID 6 solves that issue, but it still is not a replacement for backups.

RAID provides UPTIME
RAID provides PERFORMANCE
RAID does NOT provide DATA PROTECTION
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post #11 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:58pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiggy Fuzz View Post
raid 5 (might be wrong about the numbers) copies your data across two or more harddrives, so if one goes you still have the other.
This is actually RAID1 (mirroring)

RAID5 requires 3 or more drives and is striping with parity, it can rebuild from the loss of a single drive by using the parity data.
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post #12 of 19
3/13/09 at 5:59pm
You also forgot about controller going down, you can't just bung hard drives from a RAID with a ABC controller to a XYZ controller. A few people with motherboard gone down have had to buy identical motherboards, that's a problem if it's not a current line.
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post #13 of 19
3/13/09 at 7:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by audioengr View Post
Doesn't sound good. You probably lost it, unless you take it to a disk expert that can scan it or use other tools to recover it.

The moral of the story is: If you have thousands of disks and countless hours of ripping at stake, invest in a good RAID system. I'll be offering one soon BTW.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
I've seen as many people lose data because of failures in PC raid controllers as disks.

As stated by a previous poster:
raid is for availability or performance
backups are for recovery
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post #14 of 19
3/14/09 at 2:01pm
Thread Starter 
In conclusion, the active recovery software could not recover the "bad sections," so I used a USB-to-SATA/IDE adapter like this one:
3 in 1 USB 2.0 To SATA / IDE Adapter Cable + Power Cord - eBay (item 290291691084 end time Mar-26-09 02:52:59 PDT)

And the hard drive now works!

So much for USB external hard drives, and my next external drive will definitely use non-USB, such as eSATA/Firewire.
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post #15 of 19
3/14/09 at 2:31pm
Told ya...reason why I only use NAS's or internal drives for important data storage. USB drives just for temp copying and when I have it on the NAS as well (ie software & drivers for a new PC install) especially LAN drivers as fresh install may not have LAN drivers, so you need them on CD, floppy or USB disc.
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