Hard Disk Drive, Chkdsk, Restoration

My secondary, slave, ntfs drive has for some time now been malfunctioning, I thought I could restore the files via my backups so I have been ignoring it, but since i ve recently found out i can't i am trying to do something about it now. The drive was functioning just right about six months ago, but since then the following happened. I was getting delays and freeze ups when trying to access it, and for some time i kept getting the windows xp chkdsk feature on startup, after ignoring it for some time, i let it run, and then upon loading the os the drive would not respond, it would show there, with its full capacity, 40gb, but inaccesible and all 40gb appearing as free space. Since then i ve run the chkdsk start up feature quite some times (the fix errors util in the properties tab wont work within windows) and this is what happens every time. In step 1, file verification, it finds several "file record segment unreadable ", about sixty or so, and takes about 10 mins to complete, step 2 with the index verifycation, this takes about a minute or so, with a few "correcting error in index x for file y" messages, and then onto step 3 recovering info, where after a few minutes it halts and messages "insufficient disk space to recover data" (initially i thought that the master drive had too much and wouldnt let the util write its temporary files there, but alas this is not the case) "error" and then it stops loads up xp only to have the same over again on the next start up. I really do want my files back so i ve downloaded a few utils to help me out, but i wont use them unless someone more knowledgeable helps me out, because i know i might do still more harm than good. I ve got the two file recovery standards, getdataback and r studio, plus something called partition table doctor, and another prog going by the name of hdd regenerator by some russian bloke that claims to actually physically repair bad sectors.

But i need your help here, to shed some light on all that, and i wont go ahead with anything until someone is kind enough to explain the procedures.

 

Try chkdsk on your primary drive. It is possible that the Master File Table there is integrating the secondary drive files.

 

i will do that, but will you be so kind enough as to elaborate on this, i have just reformated my main drive, hope that wasn't another one in a series of unwise moves...

I have just chkdsk-ed the main drive, worked like a breeze, done in a minute.

 

Because 1) you have backed up the drive, and 2) you want to play with it rather than replace it (that would be my first choice), suggest you first use whatever utilities are available from the manufacturer's web site. Recovery of data from an inoperative disk can require special hardware and be quite expensive for that reason alone, and can turn out to be less than satisfactory.

 

sparrow, you are very knowledgeable and thanks for chiming in, but no, i might not have expressed myself correctly i HAVE NOT backed up the drive, i thought i had saved the files somewhere but it turns out, due to a series of events i wont go into for reasons of brevity, that i have not. Hence i couldn't care less for the actual drive and i am going to replace it, as soon as i manage to retrieve (some) of the files which i care dearly about.

It's a good idea to check with the manufacturers utils, i ll do that, but i would also like to know what chkdsk does, why the error messages appear, and how it's managed to turn a hdd with errors to a completely inoperative one, and where have all the files gone...

 

I see you formatted the main drive, and suspect this may be the cause.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html

Did you by any chance "Initialize" this drive?

I would try using restoration of pc inspector file recover to recover the data to your primary drive (not the damaged drive) and then try a clean format of the bad drive.