Other External products

[Memphis]

I was in midst of formatting my seagate 500gb external expansion drive when the power cable snapped. I reconnected the power and usb cables and the hdd showed up in windows explorer with the drive letter G: but on accessing it asks to format.

When I am accessing the Disk Manager, the external hdd does not show up in the upper window of the disk manager. In the lower window of the disk manager the hdd shows up as Disk 1 with a blue band and 465.76 Gb written but there is no drive letter or the message healthy partition. 

When I try to assign a drive letter or format the external hdd through disk manager, it says "an unexpected error has occurred. Check the system event log for more information on error. close the disk management console, then restart the disk management or restart the computer."

I am not able to find any logs in the system event logs (not sure if i am looking at the right place) nor the rebooting the system helps. How do I get my external hdd working again ?

[AlanM]

First right-click on the partition and Delete the partition.

Then try to create one again.  

[Memphis]

If I right click on the drive in the Disk Manager, I get the option to delete the volume which again results in the same error message.

[Memphis]

The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume \Device\HarddiskVolume1.

and if I run chkdsk utility it says it cant work because the drive is not formatted.

[AlanM]

OK, at this point you need to bring in a bigger gun, to do a drive erase.  

Try using DiscWizard's erase function.   

If that doesn't work, there's unfortunately a pretty decent chance that the drive is failing.  Use SeaTools for Windows.   

[fzabkar]

Memphis, if SeaTools or DiscWizard don't work, you can try zeroing out the MBR and partition table by hand using HxD.

HxD - Freeware Hex Editor and Disk Editor:

http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

Select Extras -> Open Disk, uncheck the Readonly box, and select your appropriate Physical Disk. In the Sector box type 0 and hit Enter. That's LBA 0.

You can zero out everything from offset 000000000 to 0000001F0. Then select File -> Save.

Just be absolutely sure you have selected the correct drive.

Then eject the drive and reinsert it. Disk Management should now see an uninitialised HD.

[Memphis]

For some reason, my laptop did not boot up with the Diskwizard bootable disk and HxD editor is not showing the external drive in Open Disk section. What to do now???

[fzabkar]

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.

[Memphis]

Hi, the link is not opening up.

[Memphis]

i downloaded the sector inspector from microsofts website but it dsnt seem to support Vista.