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USB Hard drive

Discussion in 'Tilted Gear' started by Strange Famous, Dec 26, 2011.

  1. Strange Famous

    Strange Famous it depends on who is looking...

    Location:
    Ipswich, UK
    I dont know if anyone has heard of a problem like this, or if I can even explain properly, but

    I basically had a USB hard drive on my PC and decided to get a bigger one and transfer my files over. After transferring a load of things over I plugged it into a second PC, could see the files fine.

    Plugged it back into the first PC and moved more files onto it. Plugged it in the second PC again and got a message "drive is corrupt" and telling me to reformat it. I didnt fancy that, so I searched online but all I found where adverts for software that recovers lost files (which I would pay for if I had any way to know they would work or were even legit, but it could just be a scam)

    So I plugged it into my first PC again and rebooted. I got an message when it booted up saying the drive was corrupt and do I want to fix errors. I said yes. It came up that it was deleting error index's "or index errors" or something like that. And then when it booted up it only had the files on it which were there the first time I switched PC's. All the files I moved after that simply seem to be gone.

    What I wanted to check, is it likely that these files are completely deleted? Or just that the "mapping" to the files is deleted? Is there any software or tricks to get the data if it isnt likely to be deleted. I cant take it to work cos it has some certain files that wouldnt be appropriate to have in the work environment if you know what I mean (I mean porno rather than fraud or anything...)

    From what I read now I was foolish to trust a USB drive like this cos now Ive seen people saying they arent 100% reliable, I just thought it was like any hard drive and I wasnt running any risk. There are some files on there (as well as the porn) which I really would prefer not to lose.
     
    Strange Famous, Dec 26, 2011
    #1
  2. Speed_Gibson

    Speed_Gibson Hacking the Gibson

    Location:
    Wolf 359
    My last experience with external hard drives was an Western Digital 500 GB MyBook. The drive was showing signs of impending failure (been there more once from the 300 MB capacity and up) and I found out quickly enough that the Western Digital enclosure was failing. The hard drive was still good and is working solidly to this day as an enclosed HD.
     
    Speed_Gibson, Dec 26, 2011
    #2
  3. aquafox

    aquafox Getting Tilted

    Location:
    Ibapah, UT
    aquafox, Dec 26, 2011
    #3
  4. Strange Famous

    Strange Famous it depends on who is looking...

    Location:
    Ipswich, UK
    cheers, I'll try it! Its doing something and it says its going to take 3 days to do it (its at 5% after a few hours) so will see what happens. If it gets any of my pics back (or even any of my porn collection back!) it will be well worthwhile.
     
    Strange Famous, Dec 27, 2011
    #4
  5. CaptainBob

    CaptainBob Slightly Tilted

    Location:
    Kingston, eh?
    Are you ejecting the drive properly before unplugging? You haven't mentioned that. The file corruption would be expected if the device isn't closed properly.

    Recuva should work if the device hasn't been written to since the problem. It will be slow on a USB drive.

    I find that the fun of porn is in the collecting. Having a big collection can be more trouble than it is worth!
     
    CaptainBob, Feb 5, 2012
    #5
  6. Hektore

    Hektore Slightly Tilted

    I just wanted to address this last part because it might help you out in the future. (As long as all the fans are running properly) I would say the hard drive is the most likely component to fail in a computer and at best it's certainly not the least likely. I would bet a fair sum that if you ask anyone responsible for a large number of machines which component they spend the most time swapping out, it would be the hard drive.

    And of course as everyone else has mentioned it's really important to always properly eject all your hardware.
     
    Hektore, Feb 6, 2012
    #6
  7. martian

    martian Server Monkey Staff Member

    Location:
    Mars
    You rang?

    That would be roughly 4 dozen servers at last count, with anywhere from 4-24 drives per server, plus a handful of desktops. I don't know if I spend the most time swapping out hard drives, but that's almost certainly by virtue of the fact that most of the disks are hot swappable in drive caddies so it's actually easier than changing a light bulb.

    Hard drives are expected to fail, and generally treated as consumables. When you get into large scale stuff you begin hearing the word redundancy a lot, as well as continuity. The basic premise is that any single drive is treated as a ticking time bomb, which means that any piece of information we actually need should exist in multiple copies in multiple locations. Three is the minimum. More is better.

    USB hard drives tend to suffer more wear and tear than the enclosed sort, by virtue of the fact that they're external and portable. There's also more pieces, which translates to more to go wrong. The drives themselves are usually just standard 2.5" SATA drives these days, and not any less reliable than an internal disk. A drive sitting on a shelf in a single location should hypothetically be only marginally more prone to failure than the one that lives inside your PC.

    The data may still exist on the drive, but there's no guarantee. Every time you access the drive, you decrease the likelihood of actually being able to recover stuff. There are some generic retail 'undelete' programs that may help, but it's worth noting that these are a league apart from proper data recovery tools, and will do little more than rebuild indexes. There's a good chance that whatever you lost is gone forever, and let that be a lesson to you. If it's important to you, you should have at least two copies of it, and on separate disks.
     
    martian, Feb 6, 2012
    #7
  8. Hektore

    Hektore Slightly Tilted

    I suppose I should have stated the most frequent swap then, rather than most time consuming. I gather at least you knew what I meant though.

    So there you have it, straight from the horse's err... monkey's mouth, so to speak.
     
    Hektore, Feb 6, 2012
    #8