500GB WD issues

[SteveYates]

Hi guys

I have about 400GB of movie files on a 2.5" drive that was installed and happily working and one day I turned it on and there was a circle with a line through it on the HDD icon.

I also have a Samsung Blueray/DVD combo drive installed so I opened the C-200 and switched the Sata cables for the devices hoping to get a quick diagnostic.

The Samsung drive still worked and the HDD still didnt when I powered it back up so I am hoping the C-200 is fine.

I had no way to test the HDD so I ordered an All in 1 HDD dock for Sata/Ide drives and installed the driveres for it and inserted the drive into the dock.
The red light comes on the dock to show the drive is being accessed so I think it is working.

Being a linux based system, I probably wont be able to read this disk straight out of the box on my Windows 7 pc so what steps do I need to take to confirm the drive is healthy?

I cannot see or access it in Explorer however in disck managment I can see it and it says it is healthy however the only options available to me are to delete the partition I click on.

Any help would be appreciated.

Steve

[Willem53]

disk is probably in need of file maintenance, I use Acronis disk director suite to do repairs... http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pro...kdirector/

I you want to read and write to healthy Linux EXT3 disks from Win7 try http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/

[SteveYates]

I downloaded and installed ext2fsd and am able to see the drive and assign it a drive letter which then allows it to come up in explorer but I still cannot access it.

I will have a look at the Acronis software but I assume you would need to access the drive before you can use it

[BanditRider]

GParted live is a free tool for checking Linux partitions.

[Willem53]

True... but he asked for a tool strait out of windows 7

[SteveYates]

What type of file maintenance do you suggest I perform on the drive?

[Willem53]

what tool do you have?

[SteveYates]

acronis disk director 11 build 11.0.216

it does not seem to have a repair option however, only move, resize, delete, format etc

[Willem53]

does it show the volumes and their status on the EXT3 disk?
is it bootable?

if this is OK then download the free http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php/download.php

make a bootable CD from the ISO and set your PC to boot from CD, perform a chdsk

[SteveYates]

It shows all 4 partitions on it as Healthy.
1 as not formatted, a small 1 thats only 492 MB
None of them are active.
I will download and make the iso now and see how I go.
Thanks for helping me out.
Appreciate it

[SteveYates]

I downloaded and burnt gparted and restarted into it.
It showed sd1,sd2,sd3&sd4
sd2 is a swap file
I selected check on sd1,2&4 and it did sd1 & sd2 fine then gave me an error on sd4
so i selected sd4 on its own and it completed and said it had successfully done its check. No details of what it may have fixed though.

Do you think I should try reinstalling it now?

[accident]

I'd reinstall it.. sounds like it fixed whatever was out of wack.

[SteveYates]

Okay. HDD is reinstalled. I thought all was back to normal when I opened oversight because it sill had all my covers etc but I see when I go into the files/video that there is nothing there so thats a shame. I seem to have lost the lot somehow.

[SteveYates]

Weirdly enough all my music is still on the hard drive, and other files. Just not movies.
Is there any tools etc to recover them?
I doubt it can be done over a network and I know I can get them back with Recuva or similar on the pc, just wondered if there was a NMT specific tool used by the community.