I have a Onnto O’tostore TB-S120 Sata HDD enclosure with a Hitachi HTS543232L9A300 320 GB hard disk inside (formatted as FAT32) which recently crashed after I used it in an ‘unconventional’ manner (explained below). I am running Windows Vista on my laptop and have been using it for around 6 months now and the external hard drive was about half full. But since the crash when I plug it in, it still shows up in ‘My Computer’ but only as ‘Local Disk (F
’ instead of what it used to be named. When I double click on the drive it opens up but appears to be empty. However when I right click on the drive and go to ‘Properties’ it is still showing that I have used 154GB of the 320GB. So while this is re-assuring, I can’t seem to see or access the data. The drive makes no strange whirring or clicking sounds. There was no smoke when it crashed.
This is the same for multiple machines –I can load it up on my desktop PC (running XP) using the firewire port on the drive instead of the USB and the same problem exists. So I have tried different machines, different OS, different connections (USB or Firewire) and still can’t see my data. I tried plugging my external hard drive into a Mac and it had the same problem, but it also loaded onto my hard drive the files that Mac OS use – so now the only 3 files visible on the hard drive are the .Trashes folder, the DS_Store file and a ._.Trashes file which the Mac put on there. Has my hard drive crashed or is there an easy way to find my data again? Will some file recovery software be sufficient for this problem or do I need to take it to a data recovery firm to restore the contents? I DID back the drives contents up but it was about 3 weeks prior to the crash and since then I had done numerous hours of work which I would like to recover!
Detailed description of what I was doing when the drive crashed:
The HDD enclosure has both firewire and USB 2.0 outputs, but to power the USB connection you need to use a separate cable which is USB on the computers end, and goes into the small circular ‘DC IN’ input on the back of the drive. This combination works fine. My laptop does not have any firewire inputs, so I recently bought an Firewire adapter which plugs into my Express Card port on the side of my laptop. This seemed to install fine, but when I plugged in my external hard drive to the firewire input I noticed that the drive was not being powered as there was no green light on the front and it wasn’t showing up on my computer. So I had the ‘bright’ idea to also plug in the DC IN to USB cable which I normally use to power the drive while using the USB connection. This worked for about 10 minutes, but then the drive stopped responding and when I disconnected it and reconnected it, all my data appeared to be gone.
Note: when I click ‘safely remove hardware’ on my Desktop XP machine it lists the HDD enclosure’s model number (OTOSTORE TBS120) which makes me think the disk is still readable. I ran Windows Error Checking and it came back saying ‘Some Problems were found and fixed’ but then in the details it says ‘Insufficient Disk Space to Recover Lost Data’ and ‘Windows Found Problems With the File System That Could Not Be Corrected’.
’ instead of what it used to be named. When I double click on the drive it opens up but appears to be empty. However when I right click on the drive and go to ‘Properties’ it is still showing that I have used 154GB of the 320GB. So while this is re-assuring, I can’t seem to see or access the data. The drive makes no strange whirring or clicking sounds. There was no smoke when it crashed. This is the same for multiple machines –I can load it up on my desktop PC (running XP) using the firewire port on the drive instead of the USB and the same problem exists. So I have tried different machines, different OS, different connections (USB or Firewire) and still can’t see my data. I tried plugging my external hard drive into a Mac and it had the same problem, but it also loaded onto my hard drive the files that Mac OS use – so now the only 3 files visible on the hard drive are the .Trashes folder, the DS_Store file and a ._.Trashes file which the Mac put on there. Has my hard drive crashed or is there an easy way to find my data again? Will some file recovery software be sufficient for this problem or do I need to take it to a data recovery firm to restore the contents? I DID back the drives contents up but it was about 3 weeks prior to the crash and since then I had done numerous hours of work which I would like to recover!
Detailed description of what I was doing when the drive crashed:
The HDD enclosure has both firewire and USB 2.0 outputs, but to power the USB connection you need to use a separate cable which is USB on the computers end, and goes into the small circular ‘DC IN’ input on the back of the drive. This combination works fine. My laptop does not have any firewire inputs, so I recently bought an Firewire adapter which plugs into my Express Card port on the side of my laptop. This seemed to install fine, but when I plugged in my external hard drive to the firewire input I noticed that the drive was not being powered as there was no green light on the front and it wasn’t showing up on my computer. So I had the ‘bright’ idea to also plug in the DC IN to USB cable which I normally use to power the drive while using the USB connection. This worked for about 10 minutes, but then the drive stopped responding and when I disconnected it and reconnected it, all my data appeared to be gone.
Note: when I click ‘safely remove hardware’ on my Desktop XP machine it lists the HDD enclosure’s model number (OTOSTORE TBS120) which makes me think the disk is still readable. I ran Windows Error Checking and it came back saying ‘Some Problems were found and fixed’ but then in the details it says ‘Insufficient Disk Space to Recover Lost Data’ and ‘Windows Found Problems With the File System That Could Not Be Corrected’.