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No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 06 Aug 2019, 17:28
by addiefreyja
Hi all:

First, I'm generally a novice when it comes to computing beyond the basic, everyday use of Mac and Windows systems. Second, I don't have a lot of hope for recovering lost data ... but here goes my story anyway ...

I have an old laptop HD that I put in an enclosure a number of years ago and treated as my backup drive, mainly for years of digital camera images but also for other files and documents.

About three years ago, I was using the drive with my MacBook when the USB cord came undone from the end of the enclosure. Over time, I suppose the plug on the side of the enclosure became worn, and it is really loose these days. Unsurprisingly, when I went to reconnect and access the drive, it was no longer recognized/mounted by my Mac. This HD occasionally shows up in Disk Utility as a greyed-out drive, but sometimes it doesn't register there at all. Same goes for diskutil in Terminal. Typically, I get a pop-up window that says the drive cannot be read, and it gives me the option to initialize (does nothing), ignore or format.

When I run testdisk, the drive does show up every time. However, it appears there is no recognized file system.

When this all happened, I was able to run a number of data recovery programs on the drive (or on an image of it, perhaps) -- including photorec, Stellar products, and others -- and I did recover a fair bit of data, but many, many of the photos and videos could not be opened. The files are there, and those files are full of data (and are the expected size -- several megabytes for my photos and sometimes hundreds of megabytes for videos I'd taken), but they won't open as images/movies.

Recently, I started puttering around in Linux a bit -- not enough to really know what I'm doing, but I've learned a few commands here and there. I started thinking about my old drive and wondered about trying again, maybe this time in Linux, but otherwise on my Mac.

I expect that the drive is well and truly dead -- but there's plenty of data on it still, obviously, and short of taking it to a professional, I'm wondering if there's anything I can try, or if perhaps you all would be willing to look at some of the messages I get in testdisk/Terminal to help me understand what I'm faced with. I can post whatever info is needed here.

Thank you!

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 07 Aug 2019, 10:17
by cgrenier
All the jpg files recovered by PhotoRec should be valid. Can you check ? Big files like videos may be fragmented, so it's not unusual to have video that can only be partially displayed or none at all.

Can you check the SMART status of your disk ? If they are bad sectors, you must use another disk to store your data.

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 08 Aug 2019, 19:24
by addiefreyja
It's been a couple of years since I ran PhotoRec on the drive. I will try it again and see what happens. I've also used a few other programs to salvage items, but as I recall, each time a majority of files were unreadable. If I open the files in a text editor, there's data there, and as I said, the files are the expected size, but no program will open them.

SMART status is listed as "not supported."

I have no interest in continuing to use the drive for storage. I just want to get as much off of it as I can intact, or repair/replace the file system, if that's even possible (I'm assuming it is not). Again, I assume the drive is dead; I'm just trying to salvage as much as I can, because the photos and videos, in particular, are irreplaceable memories.

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 08 Aug 2019, 19:49
by recuperation
What is the manufacturer and model of the drive in question?

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 11 Aug 2019, 20:20
by addiefreyja
Apologies for the delayed response ...

It's a Western Digital Scorpio WD1600BEVE. 160 GB.

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 11 Aug 2019, 21:19
by recuperation
That drive should support SMART.

The lack of support could be caused by the chipset of the enclosure.
You could try a dockingstation instead.

Which program do you use to read SMART parameters?
If it's smartmontools, there is the -d switch:
https://linux.die.net/man/8/smartctl
Try out -d sat, -d sat,12, -d sat,16 and -d usbjmicron

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 11 Aug 2019, 21:30
by addiefreyja
I will take a look at that when I get home tonight. I'm not super confident in my abilities to investigate this, but I will give it a shot.

I assumed maybe the SMART status was listed as not supported because the drive was bad.

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 11 Aug 2019, 22:39
by addiefreyja
Using smartctl, I get the same result:

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Smartctl open device: /dev/disk2s1 failed: Operation not supported by device
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Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 12 Aug 2019, 18:08
by recuperation
Did you try out another connection to your computer, like a dockingstation p.e.?
You might as well put it into a laptop and boot Knoppix from DC/DVD/USB stick and run smartctl from there.

Re: No file system found on external HD after accidental cord disconnection

Posted: 15 Aug 2019, 02:45
by addiefreyja
I will look into a docking station. I don't have a second laptop to install the drive in. It's actually an old Windows laptop drive that I put in an enclosure.