1TB external harddrive, power disconnected while in use,now won't read any files

[rosamfg]

HI, We had brought our 1TB external Hitachi hard drive (XL1000) on which I had some movies and stuff to watch on the laptop on our vacation recently.  The power cord accidentally got disconnected while the external hard drive was plugged in one of the laptops that was using a file on the external Hitachi drive.  When we reconnected the power and started it up again, the laptop was not reading any files on on the external drive.  It stated that the external hard drive was not formatted and needed to be formatted before it could be used. Needless to say , I DID NOT go forward with the formatting as I knew that would erase any files left in the hard drive. I have since hooked up the Hitachi hard drive to both laptops (Acer 18 months old, and a Toshiba 8 months old, both using Windows 7)) and now that we have returned home, to the Dell desktop ( 4yrs old(maybe older?), windows Vista) all with the same results - there are no files on the Hitachi external hard drive.

Is there any hope in recovering the over 600GB of files on the this Hitachi external harddrive?

[DaveLembke]

I would crack it open and connect it via SATA to a desktop computer internally as a slave drive to where you can address the hard drive with a bummed file system. Then run check disk on the drive to try to repair it. If the external drive was jarred when the power was disconnected a head could have made contact with platter and scratched it. If thats the case then depending on the nature of the physical damage check disk may not be able to fix it and you might need to use a utility like GetDataBack NTFS. I own a licensed copy of a bundle deal of their software and it works great for retrieving data that is orphaned in a destroyed file system. This software searches drives even ones that have the all so well known armature clunk failure and is able to address the drive and sweep the data off of the platters with each clunk sweep and reassemble "most" of the data. As long as the drive spins and the armature can sweep either by clunking or being addressed by the software data can be retrieved.

I used this software on a laptop that took a flight of stairs as it was running. Engineer wanted to get to a meeting and bring his running laptop with him and well....laptop slipped from his hands while running and it cartwheeled down a flight of stairs ending with a destroyed laptop and of course data that was critical and only resided on that small damaged hard drive. I got back about 80% of his data and he was fortunate that his months of work that wasnt backed up was included in that 80%. His music files etc had some stuff missing which was acceptable than 3 months of lost engineering work at a multibillion dollar corporation.

Data recovery on his drive took 5 days to sweep and reassemble. His drive had the clunk of a dead hard drive.

Here is the software, but its not cheap. Maybe someone knows of a free option that will work. http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

You can download the trial of it to test before buying. I did that first and then when i saw the data just a $80 payment away, I bought a licensed copy to be able to grab that data which is otherwise read-only until fully activated to write to a healthy drive and recover. I ended up buying a bundle package for like $170 for all file systems and raid recovery tools etc.

GetDataBack will recover your data if the hard drive's partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT or root directory are lost or damaged, data was lost due to a virus attack, the drive was formatted, fdisk has been run, a power failure has caused a system crash, files were lost due to a software failure, files were accidentally deleted. GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. It can likewise be used even if all directory information - not just the root directory- is missing.

[Geek-9pm]

The OP did not mention the make and model of the external device. Nor did he say it was in or out of warranty.
Some Hard Drive makers have an excellent warranty policy. Others don't Knowing the make and model and date of purchase could make a big difference.

[jason2074]

Can this Portable Hard drive be powered by a USB or Dual USB cable? Might want to check first if its the AC power adapter is faulty as not carrying enough voltage output after it was accidentally disconnected. My Toshiba portable HD sometimes recognizes it as "needs to be formatted first" when using just a single usb cable, knowing that there are files already stored. Using a Dual USB Cable will correct the problem.   

[Geek-9pm]

There are two models of the Hitachi-XL1000.
They are not as reliable as Hitachi wants you to believe. Avoid using these drives unless the low price is what you can not resist. You get what you pay for. The drives have a poor reputation.
Both models on sale.
http://www.amazon.com/Hitachi-XL1000-External-Drive-0S02484/dp/B0039ZYBMQ

The problem is not the interface not the power supply. It is the drive itself. And you can not fix it unless they have a firmware update.
......
EDIT: Moderator, before you ask, look at this. On Amazon, 7 out of 12 gave it the worst rating.

Dead after a couple months
Do not purchase this drive. It died after two months of use. I have never had an external drive die so quickly before. It would not start up on any operating system and appears to be cycling as though it can not start up. I failed to research this product online before buying and that was my mistake. I hope my review will protect others.
Published 8 months ago by JT
http://www.amazon.com/Hitachi-XL1000-External-Drive-0S02484/product-reviews/B0039ZYBMQ

Notice the report has been up 8 months and Amazon did not remove it. That says a lot. If the customer was wrong, they would have removed his post.
An yes, I cross checked with another site that had about the say thug to say about the Hitachi 1!TB drives mentioned here. And there are other random forums where people grip about this model.