Report drive requires formatting. But full of info.

[ericmark]

I have a faulty drive on main computer gone for repair, and using a rather old lap top, plus a desktop with no monitor have to use TV so not easy to use.

One of the USB sticks only 8 Gb went faulty saying it needed to be reformatted, then a 2 TB hard drive did the same. I am wondering if due to using on an old Vista laptop which has a job keeping up with things?

I got a new 2 TB drive and set to recovering lost data, to date going well, but reports 12 days left, so the desk top now needs to be left on for 12 days, not what I really want to do. However it does seem as if I am going to get data back.

I am assuming once I have got all the data off the drive I can re-format and use again? It was the back-up drive for the laptop which went for repair so timing was not good, there is a limit to how many back-ups one can make.

But the question is could the really slow laptop have caused this problem? Was it just unlucky or is there a problem when laptops run slow in them not writing to a drive properly?

 

[JohnD]

I am assuming once I have got all the data off the drive I can re-format and use again?

This is a drive which has previously gone faulty?

I wouldn't trust it with anything I hadn't already got backed up.

 

[ericmark]

This is my problem has the drive malfunctioned because the laptop is faulty, or because the drive is faulty?
It seems no data has been lost, it is just the drive map which went faulty, it is possible I forced the laptop to switch off while it was still writing to the drive.

The idea is to always have data on two drives, it was having two drives well in fact three drives go faulty at the same time which really caused the problem. The twin solid state drives in my laptop went, and my son thought he could replace them with non solid state and an adaptor, but they would not fit in the space, so has to be new solid state drives, so there was a delay getting the laptop repaired.

The desktop is really used to record and play TV and is connected to the TV as a monitor, so in the main I have been using a rather old laptop which is really slow, I have to boot it, then wait for it to catch up before using or it will freeze.

I am assuming since I have had problems with both USB sticks and the 2 TB hard drive that it is the laptop causing the problems, now I don't use any external drives on it. Just in case.

The recovery software has not reported a single problem recovering files, so it does seem likely after formatting it will work again. However 2 TB drives hold a lot of info, it to start with reported it would take 14 days to transfer files onto a new drive, now reduced to 12 days, but that is still a lot of time. I think 2 TB drives are too big and I should have gone for 1 TB drives, but too late now.

 

[Tigercubrider]

My living is video and we used to pay extraordinary prices for what are now tiny drives in the old days (- a grand a gig!) but I am not an IT bod

Large drives are ok but you are putting all your eggs in the one basket .
Often a drive report will base it's time left as being based on the last task . So if you have a big messy file that takes ages, the system imagines that all the others are the same. Next file is easy so the time may change

Have you tried the drives in another computer?

Once you get the data back mirror copy it to two drives

I am a mac person but in the days you needed to defrag windows I found it easier to copy all the data across to another drive and then reformat rather than the lengthy defrag process. Do windoze drives still need defrag?

 

[mattylad]

I have seent his "it needs formatting" thing before, and then the stick has been fine on another PC.

 

[ericmark]

Well down to 10 days now, still running 9% data transferred to date. Most is backed up some where, but not all and until I can see what is there I will not know, so no option but attempt to recover all. I think the problem was caused by a very slow laptop, and me closing down the laptop with hard reset when it refused to shut down, likely the hard drive was not responsible for the problem.

Pictures are important to me and likely stored on multi-drives, but films, and music it's just handy to have on hard drive, somewhere the original DVD or CD exists. Not really worried if I lose that sort of info. In the main the drive effected was the back-up drive, but the computer it was backing up has gone for new hard drives to be fitted, just happened at the wrong time.

 

[Doggit]

It's a bit odd that all the drives seem to have failed at the same time, so it suggests the laptop could be the issue. Have you tried fitting the drives in another computer as a slave, and then running a diagnostic on them. Using ordinary file transfer is always going to take time, and you would have been better using a newer computer to do the transfer, but a ghost or drive copy program would have done the job a lot quicker, as they work in a totally different way.

A slow computer won't have caused the problem, as the drive will just twiddle it's thumbs whilst waiting for data from the computer, and forcing it to switch of would corrupt the data, but not normally the disk, but if it had corrupted the data table, then a reformat would be fine.

See if you can find an old copy of Norton utilities to repair the data on the drive with yourself; it will check for iffy data locations, and mark them as not useable without a destroying the data.

 

[ericmark]

After using "Recuva" to get most of the data transferred I found how to get an administrator command prompt to work in windows 10 using the windows a X key. I then ran check disk (chkdsk k: /f /r /x) and I am waiting to see the result. At 10% of stage 4. It must be worth a try before re-formatting the drive.

The windows 10 PC is a desk top using the TV as a monitor mainly used to record and play back TV programs, but since the computer can work away in the back ground while the TV is not set to PC monitor mode this works well. So now just waiting.

 

[ericmark]

So 10% at 6:44 am and 37% at 17:54 so seems I have a long wait.

 

[ericmark]

How long should chkdsk take and what does replaced bad clusters mean?

Still at stage 4 at 99% total 74% ETA 41:13:18 it has a report "Windows replaced bad cluster in file 390898 of name \SYSTEM~1\{88A66~1." plus 5 more but since it says system crossing fingers and hope this is what stopped me using drive in normal way?

The big question is what to do after it has all finished even it it works again? File system is NTFS which means the TV will not read it, needs to be FAT32 for that, other wise I would just use the drive for films, i.e. read only. I have tried to always save pictures to two drives, in the main PC's own drive and a USB drive, but this has back-fired to some extent. The Laptop I was using had two RAID solid state drives, plus a mechanical drive, the solid state drives failed. Son tried to fit mechanical drive, but physically would not fit, so fitting two solid state drives. I would save all docs and pictures to mechanical so once repaired I should get them back.

One major error was when I had taken 10,000 pictures I did not change the pre-fix, so I have potentially two pictures called IMGP2222.PEF since pictures taken in RAW are not altered it is only the side-car which holds the corrected info as long as I get the RAW pictures back I can reprocess them nothing permanent lost, however now they are all in one folder together rather than in date labelled folders which "Bridge" auto made when I up-loaded them. I can't be sure if there were two of same name or not. Lucky with the Nikon I have not gone around the clock yet.

I am crossing fingers and hope once chkdsk has finished I can get the directory structure back?

 

[ericmark]

Aborted end of stage 4 with unknown error, not fixed, ran again, but this time just chkdsk k: /f much faster, again unknown fault, however now it works again as normal, so transferring data while I can. Does seem drive is fixed, but I will be wary on what I use it for.

 

[AlanE]

Once data is recovered suggest you bin drive, they're cheap enough these days.

Why continue using a faulty drive for anything? Not worth the continued stress.

 

[ericmark]

Once data is recovered suggest you bin drive, they're cheap enough these days.

Why continue using a faulty drive for anything? Not worth the continued stress.

Likely keep it as a second back-up, but agree not wanting to use for anything which is important. Even if it seems now to work A1.

 

[eveares]

Windows is renowned for saying removable drives/media need re-formatting when they are perfectly fine, can occur when a drive is removed without properly ejecting it. It is normally safe to ignore the message about needing to re-format.

If the Removable Hard Drive is USB 3 compatible, it will be quicker if your plug it into a blue USB 3 port if you have one. Windows is also not very accurate or reliable in the time estimates it gives for how long the data will take to copy across.

 

[ericmark]

Second run of chkdsk k: /f and although it said it had some unknown faults it worked again. 2 x 2TB drives now have the important data backed up. Slowly going through pictures seem to be missing some of the original RAW picture files. Maybe I never kept them.