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External SATA Hard Drive - Recovery
I was using my Acer AO 532h - with Windows 7 Starter - to do a back up of a 500GB external hard drive. This source drive was an Iomega (aka Jmicron aka Seagate) 500GB 2.5 in. SATA drive. It held the backup files for the Acer internal hard-drive (this latter had also gone u/s just recently - hence tryingto do a backup of the backups). The destination drive was a Toshiba 500GB external drive.
I used Windows (with TeraCopy) to do the transfer. It got as far as four folders (out of hundreds) when it suddenly dropped the transfer rate from MB/s down to KB/s. Then it just stopped. I thought that it was due to a lose connection - the source drive case had a micro connection (non-spec.). And the flickering blue light went out. I checked the last few folders and they were empty. I thought that the drive had failed. I now reckon it was the drive's mother board.
I bought a new case for the failed drive from Maplin - its was USB to USB - better connections. However when I mounted the SATA drive in this whilst I got a winking blue light again no drive letter was allocated and the Acer could not see the source drive (in new case) to transfer any files.
Using Windows Disk Management I found that the duff drive was viable but no letter had been allocated to it; and that all of the space on it - 465.76GB - had become 'unallocated.' The description said the drive was 'NotInitialised.'
However it is full of files - its just that they seem to have become unindexed. This leads me to believe that the index file has become corrupt - I suspect due to the lose connection with the micro socket. The disk appears to reads OK so the head and platters appear to be OK. So this implies that this is a software problem.
But how do I re-index the files, in order to copy them across to the destination drive?
Many thanks.
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