External Hard disk Iomega 2 Tb recognized by pc but can't be formatted

gabriel70 said:

i don't have anyone who as of right now would let me put my faulty hdd on their pc.

You have written that you have a desktop PC in your specs. Afraid of using it?

Even if the hdd was shot, the PC it was connected to won't suffer any damage. At most it will refuse to boot until the HDD is removed. Although at this point i'm pretty confident that it's just a faulty enclosure.

don't you think it means something?

It means that the USB controller in the enclosure is still able to do the handshake with the usb controller in the PC (that is, establishing USB connection successfully). The damaged part seems to be the one handling SATA (the HDD's interface), it can interrogate the HDD's controller to get info about it, but can no more handle any data transfer in either direction.

Again, I had failed enclosures that were capable of triggering the beeping but were otherwise paperweights.

Being all this stuff a microcircuit carved with some kind of beam at a nanometer scale on a tiny piece of silicon inside of one of the chips in the enclosure, there is nothing that can be done to fix it. Affordably anyway.

double post did realize it!

haha, abito a Modena (Emilia-Romagna).

I can't guarantee that what I buy in Italy is going to be available in the UK or in the AU (as indicated by the flags under your name). In general, most enclosures with a brand (i.e. not coming straight from China) will do fine. Check the reviews of the device and make sure it has some kind of warranty to safeguard you in case it's dead out-of-the-box.

Still, Hamlet and hama are my brands of choice. Not high end by any lenght, but their stuff is cheap and works.

Please make sure you know well what kind of hard drive you have, either 2.5" or 3.5" and likely SATA.
Should be 3.5" and SATA from the data you posted somewhere above, but don't quote me on that.

You might want to upgrade the enclosure's interface to USB 3.0 (i.e. buying a USB 3.0 enclosure) or to an enclosure using e-Sata or a NAS box (Network Attached Storage, it connects to anything that can access drives through your home network), as it's the enclosure that turns the SATA interface from the drive into something else, the drive will do fine either way, as SATA is faster than any external enclosure port.

Although if it's just going to be attached to a PS3 (as you said it was its primary use before disaster struck) it's probably pointless as it has only USB 2.0 ports, and don't know if it can access network drives.

About the case i'm about to buy, so all i need is extracting my hdd from its black case( which i have already done anyway), and put it inside the new one?

Yes, the insides are pretty much the same on most enclosures.
The different part is where the screws are and how to disassemble/reassemble the metal box. Nothing you can't figure out on your own.

gabriel70 said:

Thinking about how i proceed with the various steps suggested here, it died after i tried to restore it with partition wizard.

Stop being so negative man.
Unless you tried the HDD alone or in a new enclosure, there is no way of knowing it. Any communication to the drive itself goes through the enclosure's controllers, if they don't work well the communication to the hard drive may be impossible or suck.

Also, "restoring" a partition is a fancy term for "reading the disk very well and writing on it again to fix issues", which does not damage a drive by itself, while it's certainly a significant stress for the enclosure controllers as it's a ton of data going in and out. You will likely have lost the contents, but i doubt Partition wizard did any damage to the drive's hardware (but could have given a Coup de grace to the already flaky enclosure).

So yeah, it may not work (wouldn't be the first time an enclosure killed the HDD inside as well, but it's rare and usually linked to power regulation circuitry, not the controllers), but I think it's worth trying with another enclosure or by connecting it to another PC first.

While I took my nap and was away from my PC, I was only thinking how Seatools was able to read your HDD when the interface was not allowing any communication (Read /write). The only answer that could satisfy me was somehow it could find its mate and bypass the controller. Now it is not.

Now coming to Partition Recovery Wizard:

The MBR and partition table reside on the first sector. ( All data is stored on the other sectors) If the first sector gets corrupted, Windows cannot read the drive and shows it RAW. ( It does not see the file system). What Partition Wizard does is to scan the drive find the partition information( the start and end address of each partition) and rewrite the partition table in the first sector. It in no way can kill the HDD or corrupt the data. In fact this is a well-established and proven method of data recovery from drives that read RAW in Windows.)

Yes, it is an intensive process (the scanning) and the stress could have killed the already dying interface conrtroller further. But it is of no consequence since it was already faulty and you couldn't have done any other thing except taking the HDD out and check whether atleast your drive is good.

The available indications are that it is still good. Why?

Unlike a scanning operation, the format operation involves writing. If all the formatting you had tried earlier had reached your drive and was interrupted inbetween, you would have lost all data and no files would be seen as you have seen before when connected initially.

Now tell me, if you had no place to go for the HDD, why did you remove it from the enclosure?( Remember I gave a mild chiding)

As I had indicated earlier, handling the HDD by not-so-knowledgeable guys can kill it with static electricity on your body. It is not something you can handle like a toffee can. And that is why I recommend it as a last resort.

Now come on boy, put it into another enclosure or hook it up to another Desktop and check your hard drive keeping your eyes wide open to select the correct HDD for test.

If your HDD is dead, it may well be because of your handling/mishandling and/or other causes and in no way because of running Partition Recovery Wizard. It was fine and all the data was shown earlier. Windows was seeing it as RAW because of the partly functional and partly non-functional interface electronics blocking any read or write operation to the drive. Now it is yet another reason why an external drive can be seen as RAW apart from a corrupted first sector. Nowhere else is it documented and this is being documented here for the first time.

jumanji said:

As I had indicated earlier, handling the HDD by not-so-knowledgeable guys can kill it with static electricity on your body. It is not something you can handle like a toffee can. And that is why I recommend it as a last resort.

While this is true, hard drives are less susceptible to static electricity damage as they have a pretty large and heavy metallic casing. Touching something metallic discharges the static electricity (and it takes a while to build up again), since the circuits are insulated from the casing for obvious reasons, it should likely be fine.

Nowhere else is it documented and this is being documented here for the first time.

Heh, I guess not a lot of people had the "luxury" of having to troubleshoot a horribly crappy batch of cheap Chinese enclosures like me. Well, spread the word bro.