Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[bryan_mmx]

Good day. It took me around 3 hrs just to register to this site. What the heck was the "invalid XML message" anyway? I've enter all informations correctly but it won't process my registration until just now.

Anyway, that wasn't really why I posted this message. My concern was my 250GB Seagate ST3250318AS just suddenly crashed for no reason at all (or if there's any reason, I don't know). I've been into computers since 2004 (tweaking, upgrading, maintaining, formatting, modding, etc.) and this is the first time I've experience a total HDD crashing and out of the blue (meaning it didn't give any signs at all). I want to retrieve my important files, but all I can see now in my hard disk is 231.8 of unallocated space. It was partition into 52.8GB and 179GB. Any help how to retrieve my files? Thanks. Also, can someone tell me what are most likely the cause of this so that I may prevent another crash in the future? Thanks!

[pamelaz]

Hello,

When did you see a ""invalid XML message" upon trying to register?

Thank you!

[fzabkar]

I can't offer a reason for your problems, but could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine it.

If the partition table is damaged, then you may be able to rebuild it with TestDisk (freeware):
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

[ghaghnos]

I have the same problem all the sudden my 2000 GB disk showing UNALLOCATED SPACE.

What happened I had already partitioned half of the drive about 900 GB in two drive which I placed data on them.

The other half was free and decided to partion with disk management on Vista  did not finish completly tried again.

This morning when I turned the pc it gave me shock all unallocated and now have no access to data already stored

As fzabkar suggested I execute a third party program ( SIrun ) and showing the following report

mention that the drive ID is drive 0 in bois system and in this report:

=====================

REPORT: SEE ATTACHMENT PLEASE

Thanks for your help

[Cantbecanit]

You should be able to recover data with this ....Powerdatarecovery free edition, and have you tried allocating it in disk management, don't format it if it says you must, not until you've recovered your data anyway.

[fzabkar]

PHYSICALDRIVE0 is your 2TB drive. PHYSICALDRIVE1 is a 250GB drive.

PHYSICALDRIVE0 appears to be correctly detected by BIOS with its full capacity, ie ...

243201 Cylinders x 255 Heads x 63 Sectors/Track x 512 Bytes/Sector = 2,000,396,321,280 bytes

Your drive has 3 primary NTFS partitions (type 0x07) plus one extended partition (type 0x0F).

The Extended Boot Record (EBR) for the extended partition is at sector 2125266944. This occurs at the 0.990 TiB point in the drive.

(2 125 266 944 x 512) / (2^40) = 0.9897

Sector Inspector is able to read the boot sector (2125268992) of the first drive in your extended partion. Understandably, because this logical volume has not yet been formatted, its boot sector is all zeros.

However, SI complains as follows when trying to read the EBR for the second logical volume at sector 3,016,148,992 (= 2125268992 + 890880000):

"Error 1117 was encountered reading from \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0.

The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."

The problematic sector is near the 1.5TB point. Therefore I'm wondering whether you are seeing a 1TiB limitation issue. This often occurs with NVIDIA's NForce drivers. The solution in such cases is a driver update.

If, instead, the problem is due to bad sectors, then I would perform a surface scan using SeaTools for DOS. Is SeaTools confirms a media issue, then I'd clone your drive, sector-by-sector, using a utility that understands how to work around bad sectors. Then use data recovery software on your clone.

BTW, all your data partitions appear to be intact, so I can't understand why you aren't able to access them.