IDE HDD with USB casing - lost one drive

[k_detroja]

Hello,

I am facing some problem with my HDD that I am using as external Harddisk.

I have been using this since a few months. Everything was working fine till yesterday. Yesterday suddenly, one of the logical drives is not available. It shows the drive letter, but there is nothing in the drive and it gives a message saying "the drive is not formatter, do you want to format it now?"
The properties of drive shows partition size to be 0 bytes !!!

I think the partition table must have got corrupted... I am using FAT32 file system.

Any solutions???

Greatly appreciate ur time and help...

Regards,
Ketan

[DimaYasny]

more hardware details please

[k_detroja]

Mine is a Seagate IDE HDD - 320GB.

The External casing that enables my drive to be connected in USB port is TechCom.

Any other details u r asking for?

I was reading on the web and it looks like I am facing a "Boot Sector of partition" Error...

What solution can be used for the same?

Regards,
Ketan

[DimaYasny]

so let me get this right
- you are using an external USB case with one 32ogb drive in it
- you had the external drive partitioned, and saw it in your system as several logical disks
- one of the partitions started showing the "drive not formatted" error

is that correct? are all other partitions are functioning fine?

[sarkar]

Do something.. get an application like Acronis Partition Recovery. Plugin the drive into your PC directly, not through USB and try to recover it. I had a same problem with my external drive and I did that and it worked. Please reply if successful or not.

Cheers,
sarkar

[k_detroja]

so let me get this right - you are using an external USB case with one 32ogb drive in it - you had the external drive partitioned, and saw it in your system as several logical disks - one of the partitions started showing the "drive not formatted" error

is that correct? are all other partitions are functioning fine?

Yes,
What you said is correct.

I have seen the partition as logical disks for so many times. before I started getting this error.

Regards,
Ketan

[sarkar]

Ketan try the steps above. I think that'll solve your problem

[k_detroja]

Do something.. get an application like Acronis Partition Recovery. Plugin the drive into your PC directly, not through USB and try to recover it. I had a same problem with my external drive and I did that and it worked. Please reply if successful or not.

Cheers, sarkar

Dear Sarkar,

Thanks for your reply.

I will try to do that as soon as I can connect my harddisk to PC directly. I only have a laptop with which i connect my drive.

Regards,
Ketan

[DimaYasny]

I'd try to swap the drive's location within the rack. another even better choice would be to take the faulty drive out and connect it directly to another pc and see if it shows up there.
problem could be with both the enclosure and the drive itself, and it doesn't really look like a software related issue

[k_detroja]

Hi all!

Thanks all for help. I solved my problem as under.

I had one of the drives missing from my hard disk. I attached that drive to the PC directly, but still the problem persisted.

I tried using fixboot of Partition Table Doctor. It did not work. When I went in edit sector option, I found that the boot sector had some invalid caracters in first three lines.

So I saved first a healthy drive's boot sector and loaded in the faulty drive. I am now able to access the partition. The drive still shows error when I start partition table doctor.

Thank again for help.

Regards,
Ketan