External drive format problem

[ebhutton1717]

Suddenly my external drive is telling me that it needs formatted and that formatting will erase all the data.  Obviously I have that data saved on the external drive because I want to keep it.  Is there a way to retrieve the data - get into the drive with out reformatting it?

I have a toshiba with a pentium (r) dual core cpu T4200 with a windows vista home premium operating system and the drive is a acomdata tm model PDHD1000USE-72 s/n D1318070 from radio shack.

I can be emailed at [email protected]

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

I have researched that drive and can't find what the make and model of the drive is . But that aside it would be better to work on the problem with the hard drive directly connected to a sata port on the computer. This would allow you to run data recovery software on the drive and recover the data as well as run diagnostics to check that the drive is ok.

For data recovery i would recommend.   http://www.easeus.com/

And to check the drive the manufactures diagnostics or HDD tune http://www.hdtune.com/

[jason2074]

Your portable drive has 2 ports according to its specs., for USB 2.0 and eSATA. Have you tried both connections and on a different PC? Was there any chance that it could be dropped or unplugged while reading/transferring files?

[Geek-9pm]

Awhile back drives like that model had some serious problems. But it is hard to say if you can get the data off. The failures on those devices is most ofte destroy the data.

There are hundreds of bad reports specific to that particular drive model. Granted, some may be due to operator error. But many of the reports simply state the drive failed for not apparent reason.

[Lumpy44]

I had one die on me a few months ago. Lost all my backed up stuff. Good thing I had the original......

[Geek-9pm]

I had one die on me a few months ago. Lost all my backed up stuff. Good thing I had the original......

Sad to hear that. This problem with external 1TB drives stated about for or five years ago. By now you would think it should be all over with at last. But apparently there is some overstock that is still out there. Or maybe they did not really fix the problem.

So if anybody is thinking about investing in  a 1TB drive that is not from a new production, be very careful. If you buy one and see that a model is an older version, the vendor might replace it with a new version if you ask. The vendor may not even be aware that nit is old stock.

[BC_Programmer]

With hard drives, it ALWAYS a matter of WHEN will the drive fail, not if. The size of the hard drive has no bearing on this eventuality.

[Geek-9pm]

With hard drives, it ALWAYS a matter of WHEN will the drive fail, not if. The size of the hard drive has no bearing on this eventuality.

Not True.
Are you day dreaming again BC?
My reference is to the drives taht were first introduced about four years ago, not to all current production.
The 1TB and 2TB  platter was/is a new technology. The infoant morality of the new 1TB drives was very high.  It is now stable. But, as I said in the post, there is the issue of old stock on the shelf. This industry has a bad habit of putting junk back into the mainstream. It has been documented and hyou nknow it.

The poster blames the hard drives, not the mobos...
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/161591-motherboard-diagnostic.html

www.rad-direct.com/datasheet/justadisk.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
disk, will experience a higher initial rate of failure. (infant mortality) then settle down for a few years into .... system built with 1TB drives requires just 11 disks. ...

[BC_Programmer]

my 1TB drive is about 3 and a half years old.

Why hasn't it failed? luck? Of course luck, because all drives fail and regardless of brand some will fail within a short period of time. But if it did fail- how would I know if the cause was a manufacturing defect or if it just happened to be one of the drives that don't last long?

And if so, why have none of the other 1TB+ drives I've purchased failed either? They are equally as old, and I didn't double-check any model numbers. I tend to avoid getting involved in wild goose chases when said wild goose is both invisible and covered with butter. I just get used to the smell.

More to the point though, since both of those could easily be availability error,- the Original Poster says nothing about the size of their drive. That particular model comes in 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, and 1.5TB versions. They say nothing about the size of their drive. You assume both that it is 1TB or larger, that it is a given age, and that it is a certain model (WDC) based on your decision that this is the cause,despite the lack of any information aside from "the drive failed" that bears any similarity to any of the confabulated evidence that both ignores statistical anomalies and then says certain drives fail more often than others based entirely on values well within a margin of error that would point to it.

[Geek-9pm]

Code: [Select]

the lack of any information aside from "the drive failed" that bears any similarity to any of the confabulated evidence that both ignores statistical anomalies and then says certain drives fail more often than others based entirely on values well within a margin of error that would point to it.
False statement. The statistical study shows that about four years ago there was a lot of **** 1TB drives being pushed into the consumer market taht filued within a few weeks. The abnormality was the mentaligy of the vendors that tried to fool the consumers with junk.

(Remember, I have already qualified this as to a problem thata is already old and does not represetn current production.)

[BC_Programmer]

How do you know the drive is 1TB and how do you know it is a brand affected by this?

They didn't state the size. And even if they did, that particularly external drive uses Samsung for the Internal drive anyway.

Also, that PDF you cited? That particular quote comes out of a passage regarding RAID storage and SATA drives and makes the point that for a RAID of 10TB in size you would need 43 or 44 250GB disks, but 11 1-TB disks, and goes on to say that the failure rate was about a quarter of the failure rate of the smaller drives- which is to be expected since the latter had four times as many disks. Absolutely nothing else is stated and the entire white-paper seems to focus on the use of enterprise-grade drives in a RAID setting, not on consumer drives in a desktop computing environment. And it says directly that the larger 1TB drives are more reliable even on a per-drive basis then their smaller brethren. This study says NOTHING about the consumer market, aside from saying that the paper is not about them.