Disc structure is corrupt - questions about Mini Tool Partition Wizard

[RiddleyWalker]

I have a 2Tb portable WD harddrive that suddenly stopped being able to save data (even though I was playing music from it) and is now completely inaccessible - I get the typical 'disc needs formatting' message; check for errors can't access the disc and changing the drive letter does nothing.
Thankfully ZAR can detect my files and original names although many are unverified. What I really want however is to try and recover my entire drive rather than extract each file to a new drive.
So I followed all the advice in this excellent thread:
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/334380-disk-structure-corrupt-unreadable.html
and I'm at this odd point with Mini Tool Partition Wizard where it seems to be continually looping through the same action. The dialogue window just says "Inserting an index entry into of $0 of file 25" over and over and over. It adds a new entry every second and just keeps going. Been almost an hour now;

So my question is - I can't let it run forever so how can I kill this process?
Also what is going on and what should be my best step? I'll probably run Test Disc next.
Thanks
Steve






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[ICIT2LOL]

Hello and welcome Riddley mate two things you can do is run these if you have not already
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/139810-sfc-scannow-run-command-prompt-boot.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/433-disk-check.html > use the /f and /r switches if you need to

I know you may think this is the ruddy obvious but give them a go. If it comes to retrieving data anyway then there are the Linux Mine MATE and Ubuntu bootable disks that can do that independent of Windows

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

sometimes this can work --especially for portable drives.

Connect to a different computer or connect to a POWERED USB hub on the original computer and re-boot.

I've had a couple of problems with those 2TB portable passport drives -- I won't buy those any more again.

Final thing is the HDD making "funny noises" -- sometimes that happens when the USB port isn't delivering enough power -- that's why I'd recommend a powered hub or use what's known as "a charging port" on the laptop --has more power than a standard USB port.

If these don't work then you probably will have to try and recover as much as possible individually.

I've posted elsewhere that although people seem to be getting the point that their OS should be backed up you should also back up data (multi-media etc) files as well. Once you've recovered your data BACK IT UP. You don't have to backup as often as the OS -- after initial backup just take incremental backups. Music files probably don't change much if at all apart from adding new ones and deleting some old ones.

A Linux live CD (or USB) can sometimes work wonders with a Broken partition /windows file structure too. Download any of the live distros and have a go with that too. The Live distro won't do anything to your Windows OS disk if you don't want it to.

GPARTED as well (live downloadable) can often repair a partition.

Cheers
jimbo