0

I recently bought a Seagate expansion 1TB external hard drive; it have been running well for almost 3 months now, but three days ago while I was transferring some files to a flash drive everything got stuck (the transferring was at 0-bytes/second and file explorer wasn't responding),then I tried ejecting the hard dive but since it wasn't responding I couldn't so I plugged out both the flash and hard drive disks then restarted the PC..... but :( when I plugged the hard drive back in windows made that sound but the H.drive wasn't in file explorer menu as a volume.

So I went to check if disk management detected the hard drive then disk management Welcomed me with a window having title of "initialize disk" and two radio buttons having choices of "MBR" & "GPT"(I will include screenshots). I tried both one by one but it kept on showing the error "data error(cyclic redundancy check)".And when i pressed OK there was my 1TB HD unallocated, all the "new sample" menus are grayed out when I right clicked on the disk!

Any ideas on which of my stupid solutions from above could have caused this and Please is there any way to fix this I have important files I can never get again if lost now!(and also i tried to see if it works on multiple windows PC and a Linux machine but nothing)

initialize disk image redundancy check error unallocated disk

3
  • Sounds like your hard drive is faulty. (It. Might be a cable or USB driver fault, but this is not very likely)
    – davidgo
    Mar 2, 2018 at 8:37
  • Cyclic Redundancy Check errors are serious and usually require drive replacement. Any drive, new or old, can fail at any time and often without warning or apparent cause. This is just one of the reasons why it is so important to have backups of important files, 2 or more backup copies if the files are of particular importance.
    – LMiller7
    Mar 2, 2018 at 16:03
  • You can pay a drive recovery service like drivesavers.com, but it can be very expensive. However, not as expensive as loosing files forever. This is why we back up to another hdd or cloud or whatever.
    – cybernard
    Mar 9, 2018 at 20:56

1 Answer 1

0

...i just had the same issue(while running the "chkdsk /r" command) and got the drive back by just unplugging it and later plugging it back in.

But in your case it might actually be a faulty cable issue(my issues were created by a faulty power cable in the first place), so the best option would be to try 2-3 times to unplug it and if that does not work, then take the HDD out of the external box and plug it directly into the pc to see if that works.

If the direct connection works, then get a new HDD with the same size and then clone the whole old disk to the new HDD with ddrescue and/or replace the inner cables (and you could check the health of the disk with CrystalDiskInfo while at it). If the direct connection does not work, then take it to a professional shop.

(another good application might be Spinrite, but it is supposed to be less useful than ddrescue...)

1
  • Sprinrite and ddrescue have different purposes. ddrescue tries over and over to get the drive to read the data. Spinrite actually tries to recover and rebuild(through dynastat) the sectors. However, sectors can and do die beyond its ability to recover them.
    – cybernard
    Mar 9, 2018 at 21:02

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .