How to check for bad sector on hard drive?
 

Can anyone help me by telling me how to do a check on an external hard drive that cannot get into? My HP exteternal hard drive cannot be accessed. When I plugged it in the slot othing happened. I saw that windows recognized it but it could not prepare the drive to be accessed. When this happens everything elses freezes for a while. I tried to right click it but it froze on me.

I removed form the slot and connected via a USB cable and it still did the same. I want to do a check on the sectors that probably are damaged and let it repair itself but that doesn't seem to wanna work.

So I was wondering if there is a way to do it in dos mode? If so, how? I really need this drive to work because it has my entire work history from 97' and if that is gone then I might as well just bury myself.

So please help if you can.

I recently had issues with an internal that was doing the same thing, Windows would see it but not access it.

Try this, try searching out some 'hard drive recovery programs'. Download.com is a good place to start.

Most of the programs will demo to the point of seeing the data on the drive.

If you find one that will see it, most likely it will recover it.

The drive I had lost it's volume id and was a pain to recover. But after 6 progs or so I found one that would do it.

Let me know how it works out. I'm sure that if the data is still there, you can find someway to get it.

First, I'm going to scold you for putting your life's work on a single mechanism. Bad!

Have you tried taking the drive out of the external case and installing it directly in your CPU? This would eliminate the external enclosure as a possible source of the problem. I'm guessing it is a standard ATA/IDE drive and can be plugged in next to your internal drives. Make sure the Master/Slave jumper is set correctly.

There are usually disk checking utilities provided by the drive manufacturer that work in DOS. You should be able to download them, but you first need to know who made the mechanism and possibly the model when you go to their site.

I had tried moving the external drive which is NTFS formatted and connected it as an USB connector but still the same. I had a similiar problem before a long time ago but I could still do a sector error search and repair on it and then everything would work well. But now it doesn't even let me do that.
The drive is a 160GB drive used only for backing up my files. Nothing more. This problem happened as soon as I defraged it. :(

I'll try those recovery promas and see what happens.

Please tell me which program thatdid it for you.

http://www.runtime.org/ Specifically "GetDataBack for NTFS V2.31"

Spinrite is designed for this task... it's worth giving a shot.

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

EDIT: I don't think it can access USB drives... you may need to pop it out of the enclosure and install it inside your computer.

2- If the data is really valuable, you can pay for a data recovery service. They may be a little expensive (several hundred dollars upwards).

Thanks. I will give those programs a ty.