Samsung G2 Portable 640 GB - format disk error in WinXP/Win7 Topic is solved

[dorio]

Hi all, this is my first post and i'm new to data/hdd drive recovery field so if my post seems a little amateur please forgive me . I'm trying to recover a disk with the very valuable data on it (no way i can format the disk). The original problem is - Windows XP user was unable to reach external hdd drive(Samsung G2 Portable 640GB USB) - on initial hdd plugin to the PC, indicator lighted up for a 15 seconds and then gone black(turned off). Assumed that there might be a problem with the drivers, and tried another PC(Windows 7 in this case) things looked differently now. The drive did not turn off and indicator was on, though, i was unable see any attached devices in My Computer section. This excluded the hardware failure which was great Tried to check the status of the drive using windows chkdsk - with the following error -

Error on chkdsk Windows 7 disk analysis

ErrorOnChkdsk2012-03-27.jpg (20.6 KiB) Viewed 6166 times

. Finally after 15 minutes or so (Windows 7) detected a drive but trowed another error -

Error on Access Windows 7 disk access from My Documents

ErrorOnAccess2012-03-27.jpg (27.98 KiB) Viewed 6166 times

searched for a solution and found your fabulous and free tool (great work!)
Though i'm not sure what should i do in this situation not to loose the data, tried Analyse>Quick Search>Wirite option with no luck. Could someone guide me through the recovery process (I assume MBR recovery is necessary in this case)? Here is a screenshot of the testdisk 6.11 in Ubuntu

Screen of testdisk 6.11 Intel> Analyse section

ScreenOfAnalyse2012-03-27.png (53.86 KiB) Viewed 6166 times

and one more thing to mention - by the great surprise i can see all the data on failed hdd using Ubuntu OS with no problem, can access it and read from the drive with no problems at all, by many precautions understand that i'm prohibited to write anything to the drive. Could someone with expertise knowledge in using this software guide me through the recovery process? Thank you

[remy]

Easiest and safest in this case is : Mount your disk with ubuntu, take another disk and copy everything on it.

Else, you can repair with testdisk in ubuntu, launching testdisk in superuser mode :

Code: Select all

sudo testdisk /dev/sdb

and you'll have rights to write, if there is no harware failure on the sector you want to write to.

Else you can run testdisk_win.exe with administrator rights under windows 7 (but I let you google how to do that, I don't know )

If under ubuntu, check the disk health eihter with disk utility or with :

Code: Select all

udisks --show-info /dev/sdb

or install smartmontools / run

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -A /dev/sdb

[dorio]

Thank you so much for your respose remy it's been a while i have visited this thread i've followed the easiest way , must admit - the most laborious one - transferred all files while in ubuntu to other drive. Though, must admit this solution is far from perfect(though in the rush hour it seems the only way solving this problem), as throughout the process xfce file manager prompted me to skip/replace files... As you can imagine i was away from PC assuming that process will carry out automatically, that was really nasty thing to discover, after a few hours, file transfer process only got to 3% of total file transfer task but seems all worries are in the past. After i've transferred all files, i've formatted disk, all hdd's are up and running now Thank you for your great response
Thank YOU TestDisk dev. team, for SUCH a GREAT product I'm looking forward to donate a few dollars for your great work. Keep up