Dear all,

first of all I wish to say that I do know there is another thread about this topic as well recently. But I reckon the nature of the problem maybe not the same. I apologise if I should have posted in that thread.

I have a Buffalo external harddisk 500 GB with two partitions. One of the drive is used to load my photos (ca. 30 gb occupied out of 90 gb). Recently I was trying to arrange my photos etc that suddenly the drive is no longer accessible. Maybe I should be more precise. At first, only the few folders inside the drive is not accessible: it said ''your disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?'' while other folders still readable. Panicked, I downloaded some data recovery softwares and one required me to scan the files up to 30 hours then only tell me to buy their software!

And since yesterday the problem seems to become worse. The whole drive now is not accessible, showing RAW system and the diskname changed to Local Disk. The external harddisk itself shows no physical damage, no weird sound whatsoever. So I am pretty sure it is a system crashed problem or something like that.

Is there any chance for me to save my holiday photos? I am looking for some DIY solution and any professional data recovery system which costs thousands Fränkli (well, it is what I read from the previous post) is out of questions.

Thanks for your help...

Better posting it in thesame section as the other computer and data recovery stuff http://www.englishforum.ch/tv-internet-telephone/

Try something like this http://data-recovery-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

Yes, you will need to pay, but better 50 bucks than 700 for a data recovery company!

Try posting the problem at www.pcmech.com. Great site for PC-related problems.

thanks for the advice. Have registered myself and asked the question there. Seeing there are manz IT experts here, I am still hoping for a helpful tps, instead of trying blindly the dozens data recovery software there....thanks for any experience sharing....

did you use any weird and wonderful partitioning software on the HD? I had a similar issue after using partition magic on one of my drives (to make 2 partitions into 1 big one) when windows tried to do an upgrade it completely trashed the hard disc. never managed to get anything back off it and had to re-format in the end

If you have a Desktop Computer, i would suggest attaching this as a Secondary Hard Drive inside your Computer.

But you have to open that external HDD first to identify whether the actual disk is using Parallel ATA (PATA) or Serial ATA (SATA) connector.

To help you identify

PATA is using a flat thin and wide ribbon cable (usually grey colour)
SATA is using a flat thick and not wide cable (usually reb colour)

Older external HDD is normally using PATA. If yours is thesame then you need to find a compatible Desktop Computer that uses thesame type of connector for the Hard Disk its using to boot to the installed Operating System (commonly Windows OS)

You need then to locate thesame cable inside the computer and attach the HDD in question. But before attaching the the disk make sure to change the setting of the hard drive from primary to secondary. This can be done by moving the pin at the back of the hard drive. There should be a mini manual attached to the Hard Drive on how to change this settings.

Once sorted, find a spare Four Pin Molex Connector from the power supply and and plugged it to the back of the HDD to power it up.

Power up the PC, Log in to Windows then it should show up as another Hard Drive in your "My Computer" If not you may need to go into the BIOS and get the HDD Recognised. But im pretty sure modern PC's are configured to auto recognised newly attached HDD's.

Now, If what you are saying is true that there are no physical damage to your hard drive, and that you have not used any partitioning software to partition your hard drive, Im pretty sure your files should still be intact.

I have to say though that there are alot of ways to recover a file. So have a look at what others may have to say.

Hope this works for you.

Thanks for all the response.

Yesterday I tried running CHKDSK and it took hours. I kept seeing the message File Record segment is unreadable''. So apparently there are bad sectors in my external harddisk... I let it run till this morning and when it apparently stop running (it stated something my Doc or my Computer etc and NOTHING was going on).

So I closed the cmd and restart my computer. When it restarted, it stated ''Corrupt master file table. CHKDSK aborted''.

I googled a bit and found out that the other possible solution would be running testdisk. Has anyone experience with that? Would it solve my problem? I am reluctant to open up the harddisk for two reasons. First it would void the guarantee right? Second I don't have a desktop computer with me...

Any possibility to solve the problem without dismantling the external harddisk or buying expensive data recovery software? Thanks a million for the help!

Don't open the HD, if you're not tech-savvy then there's ever chance it won't end well.

Bite the bullet and get some recovery software, 70 CHF isn't ethe end of the world compared to what professional data retrieval would cost.