I have a 1TB Maxtor Basics external hard drive. After a power cut, I lost access to the entire data in it; I couldn't see the drive in my computer but the system was slowing down and getting stuck about every 10 seconds periodically. First I tried running CHKDSK.EXE, but it didn't work, it gave the error message "Cannot open volume for direct access.". This message is given when you try to fix a non-existing drive. Soon I came to a conclusion that the partition table and/or master boot record could be damaged.
I installed one of those partition recovery software, "Active@ Partition Recovery 5.3". After a little analysis I saw that I was right. The master boot record was damaged. I read the documentation and FAQ of that program which suggest to fix master boot record first in this kind of situations. I did so, and fixed the MBR. After that, I saw that the previously existing partition was gone, and it is said to be "Unallocated Partition", (i.e; there is no partition apparent). Unfortunately that software had no partition recovery feature, so I had to do something else.
Next I installed "Paragon Partition Manager 10.0". It gave the exact same report as the previous tool did (the MBR was okay (since I recovered it by the previous tool) and the partition was "unallocated"). But, there happened to be a bigger problem. When the program tries to access this damaged harddisk, it gives a read-write error message every 5 seconds. A popup dialog box appears and informs about the R/W failure. There are three buttons on this dialog: Retry, Ignore and Cancel. If you click retry, popups appear forever, so I clicked "Ignore" for 30 or 40 times (it takes 40 x (5 sec) = 3 minutes of tedious work) before doing any harddisk operation (getting harddisk report, etc; even while starting the software). I tried recovering the partition, so it started to scan the harddisk. The bad thing is that there wasn't any end to those popups during the scan, I clicked them for half an hour and the progress-bar didn't even color up! So I gave up using this software too.
Now I need some advice and instructions from you to recover my harddisk.
1) Do I lose my harddisk contents if I create a new partition (and then use an unerase/file-recovery tool)? Or should I find and install another partition recovery software? Which one is the best solution for my problem?
2) What software do you suggest for such a situation?
I will purchase a UPS soon...
Any help or suggestion will be super greatly appreciated.
