Unable to initialize external HDD in Disk Management due to I/O error

jumanji said:

tommythecat said:

jumanji said:

Try to access the hard drive with Linux. Mount your external drive and copy the files to the internal drive (if space is available) or to another external drive.

Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer

Thanks Jumanji! I'll give it a try.

Edit: I see that I need to boot from the USB device that has lucid puppy, but my bios doesn't support boot from USB. Will booting from CD-rom work instead?

Yes, you can straightaway burn the ISO to a CD and boot Lucid Puppy from it.( I chose to to do it on a pendrive, since it will be useful to those who do not have an optical drive on their machine )

okay, I tried using Lucid Puppy but unfortunately, when I want to mount the USB drive, I don't see it in the mount dialog box.

Are there any other utilities that might help? maybe Hiren's Boot CD?

tommythecat said:

joodoo said:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 3 (without the parentheses)

That indeed work.

chkdisk /f

This didn't work as there's no chkdisk command in Windows 7's diskpart (I typed "help" and it chkdisk didn't appear in the list of supported commands).

My apologies....
The command is:
chkdsk /f.

Edit: I'll try to pay closer attention to detail.

joodoo said:

tommythecat said:

joodoo said:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 3 (without the parentheses)

That indeed work.

chkdisk /f

This didn't work as there's no chkdisk command in Windows 7's diskpart (I typed "help" and it chkdisk didn't appear in the list of supported commands).

My apologies....
The command is:
chkdsk /f.

Edit: I'll try to pay closer attention to detail.

It's quite alright, Joodoo :)

My point is that when I type chkdisk/chkdsk in diskpart in Windows 7, I get the list of commands supported i diskpart, and chkdsk doesn't appear there.

Did you mean I need to do the select in diskpart and then run chkdsk from the command prompt and not from the diskpart shell?

Thanks!

essenbe said:

Maybe this will help. How to Run Disk Check in Windows 7 look at option 2.

Thank you Essenbe.

I read carefully the link, and option 2. However I'm not sure how does that apply in my case, since the driver is not assigned with drive letter, when I connect the USB cable.

As far as I can tell, chkdsk needs a drive letter as a parameter of what drive to check, no?

Thanks!

Quite right, tommythecat.

diskpart
list disk
select disk 3
chkdsk /f

joodoo said:

Quite right, tommythecat.

diskpart
list disk
select disk 3
chkdsk /f

Hi joodoo,

I did that and here's what I get:

C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk /f
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be
checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)


When I clicked "Y", the system did restart but nothing really happened with the external drive.

Thanks!

Try this:
Command Prompt at Startup (Option One)
Connect the USB drive
Boot from Windows 7 install media
In the cmd window, type:
diskpart
listdisk
select disk 3 (or enter the corresponding drive number for external HDD)
clean all
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit

This will undoubtedly take quite some time. Be patient....