External Hard Drive Formatted In NTFS - Suddenly Inaccessible?
Sep 20, 2009
I have an external hard drive that was formatted in NTFS on an XP machine not too long ago. It is a 160 GB Western Digital. It has been working great on windows 7 for a couple of weeks. Just today it won't let me access the drive and it is telling me that I will need to format the drive before I can use it. I have so much important data on here. I am really worried about losing it all. Why is this happening?
I just put about 25 gigs of data on this drive. It's an 80 gig drive and has about 20 gigs of space left on it before it's full. Out of all the files I cut and pasted over it got stuck on this last ISO file.. it refused to move this file.. so i stopped the move operation, and rebooted. I never had any trouble with this drive. It's a drive that is hooked up via a USB port. On reboot, to try to copy or move the file again, Windows tells me this drive cannot be accessed and needs to be formatted before it can be used.
I have an external drive that does backups of files for me on a weekly basis through windows, needless to say the backup was getting bigger so I decided to go for a better data storage solution and formatted the external into NTFS. While doing this I also decided to format a USB key into NTFS.THE external drive format took hours, four or so hooked up via firewire. I blamed the issue on the drive and ignored it for the next couple of weeks. The backups didn't work properly they stopped halfway according to Windows even if I let them run 12+ HOURS. Before I formatted it took only 2-3 hours for the backup. I blamed the entire issue on the drive, maybe time to replace it, but I didn't have time to mess with it cause it was simply annoying me.Didn't use the key until tonight. Remember it is formatted as NTFS also. I started to copy a movie file to it, 700mb, it stopped at nearly 89% with 5 seconds left and did not move one bit. I hit cancel and it stayed on the cancel screen for 10 minutes with no resolve. At this point I tried to open a firefox window and it was not responding.......so what did I do I pulled the key and just like that Firefox window popped up and all was well. At that point it hit me, but the external storage solutions are NTFS, could it be my Mobo? Surely not!, Oh Microsoft you make me sad again....Just like with Vista. I reformatted the USB key back to FAT32, transferred a larger 1.4gig file in about 2-3 minutes and had no hangup issues. I can't blame the issue on the mobo especially since it relates to both USB 2.0 connection and the FireWire has the same issue. I guess windows 7 64bit doesn't like external NTFS connections. My windows appears up to date!
Well tomorrow I am receiving my SSD. And my external hdd is fat 32 and I can't backup some of my stuff because of the file size limit. I believe I need it to be NTFS but how do I change it from fat32 to NTFS?
I'm having a problem to convert my external hard rive to ntfs its showing raw it don't pickup the volume label. I whet into prompt also and it doesn't seem to see the hard drive. I tried so many stuff already.
I have a 1tb external hard disk which was working fine till yesterday. It fell down last week. After that, I transferred two files (total of 25gb) from my laptop into the external hard disk yesterday. The problem started after that. When, I tried to open any of all the files (a total of 11 including the two I transferred yesterday), it's suggesting to be formatted. The external hard drive is recognized in the disk manager to be healthy. Currently, I have turned the Easeus Recovery software on, it's showing 12 hours to be completed.
I have had no trouble in the past setting up permissions on a NTFS formatted USB drive using XP. I am able to set everyone to have only read access and myself to have full rights. The process is as follows:
- Remove all from the list except everyone. - add myself as a user with full control. - Go to advanced options for everyone and disable write access, and enable read access. - Deny takes over allow, so that's all good. - Eject USB everyone's happy .
In Windows 7 this is not the case, after formatting the USB to NTFS and going to permissions, that is where the problems start. At first the only group that has permissions as default is everyone, if I change any of these permissions I get access denied even though I am the owner because I formatted the drive. So I ignore and continue to add myself as full control. I get access denied! I then move on to making it so that everyone has read access but no write access. again access denied! What is the same process ins XP is not the same in 7, why?
It seems every time I make an amend to a permission in 7 is says access denied even though I am the admin and the owner. Tried this also on the hidden admin account and I still have the same problem. My guess is in windows 7 everyone actually means everyone, including admin and myself, so even though adding myself as an additional user it still wont allow, unlike XP where adding a user seems to overwrite everyone.
By mistake my external hard disk formatted by clean and clean. How to recover my all file Inside now when I connect the pc its detecting hard disk but not showing its connected.
I was working with two drives and mixed them up on a format. What is on the drive isn't essential, but it would be nice to see what was lost, so I can go from there. Can anyone recommend a way to get it back? It just happened and I haven't put anything else on the drive since it happened. Hit Quick Format, and stopped the formatting about 10 seconds into it, sucks
I have a 1.5TB Seagate ext HD that is formatted as MS-DOS (FAT), this was formatted on my iMac. The Mac internal HD has completely crashed. I attached the ext HD to my Toshiba Satellite laptop, the ext HD does not show in the drive list. It does show in the device manager. It also shows as working properly in the properties menu I need files from this drive. How do I get my Windows 7 system to read the ext usb drive?
I got pop up in utorrent says a directory is corrupt, I start to run chkdsk on that drive. In this case in have drive letter E. I click on computer, then go to the drive, right click, properties, tools, check now. It says the drive is need to to forced to dismount. I click on ok. then in computers, the drive just show the letter, not size or disk meter. In the open windows on task bar, I did not see scan disk running, or maybe I accidentally closed because I was switching between several programs.
I thought restart pc the drive will show again, but after restart, the drive does not show up, it says 'E: is not accessible, the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.' I tried to start pc 2 times, still same. I downloaded Partition Wizard Home Edition (minitool partition wizard home edition 5.2) and running it, it showing my files are still in the drive, but not accessible in windows. I also run chkdsk in recovery environment, but still says disk is corrupt, chkdsk cannot continue.
I've got a WD 1TB NTFS harddisk When i turn on suddenly it became inaccessible The before i turn off my PC it's still ok and also i can still copy the content to another HDD And the problem comes when i turn it on Before it i delete some unknown files that just keep coming Got "MS***.tmp" files, not just one but in multiples and before this I always delete it and it still ok But now it became inaccessible?
I have purchased a new 1 TB WD HDD (internal) and have connected it internally in my PC to my motherboard using the spare power and SATA cables within my PC. (This is the second internal disk ) I booted on the PC (windows 7 (64 bit)) - the new HDD was detected and i continued to format the disk using quick format option with NTFS (allocation cluster size 4096 bytes). I have not made partitions on this and therefore this is essentialy one large 1 TB partition.
I then loaded all the data that i wished to back up from the 3 partitions of my older existing 500 GB disk as the purpose of acquiring the new 1 TB was exactly this. Till now all is fine.
3 days later i wished to transfer some of backed up data files (on my new unpartitioned but formatted new 1 TB disk) to my Toshiba laptop (Win 7 64 bit). So i discconnect the new 1TB disk from the PC and attach it using a USB 2.0 TO SATA/IDE cable to the usb port of my Toshiba laptop. The disk is detected but a message pops up saying that the disk is unformatted and the disk management tool in Windows shows this as a basic disk (RAW).
In case you'd like to know what cable i am referring to - here it is Brando USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Cable
PS: I have tried formating the disk via the USB cable (as requested by my laptop message) but then when i attach it back as an internal disk in my PC it (the PC) detects it as an unformatted RAW disk (the vice versa problem) and requests me to format the same!
What i want to know is how to make this HDD usable both as an internal disk drive as well an externally connected USB drive? What i am doing wrong?
PS: Many years ago i have done the same without any problem with an IDE HDD
PPS: I have done the same exercise using win XP PC but i get the same problem Is it a bios setting, OS issue, partition table issue or what?
I borrowed my friend's external hard drive and a I first connected to my PC it was working perfectly. Yet the second time I tried to my PC recognized it but couldn't open it & it kept giving me the message that I need to format the hard drive before using it. I tried many time on different computers & I got the same result.
While i was formatting my LG 2.5" External HDD HXDS 320GB the power went out. The result is that I cannot use it because Windows want me to format it and it cannot be formatted.
did system restore no change to ntfs local disk.local disk changed to ntfs. cannot open local disk C:no windows action center, not working all including:Device Manager,Remote Settings,System protection not format.is there any other way except reinstallin OS again.My os is win 7 ultimate..
I have a problem for a Mac formatted WD My Passport external drive. PC recognizes the WD Smartware part of the disk but not the data. I want to reformat the whole drive to Windows 7, but I can't see any options to do that.
My harddrive have 3 partitions. I accidentily formatted the one that I need. The Windows files are not in there, but almost every programs that I installed is installed in that partition. Now, I could launch any program, it says Avast snxhk.dll is missing. If I try to launch a portable program from my use, I get this "file system error (-1073741515)" message. What should I do?
.I didn't wait for the computer to tell me it was ok to remove the drive in the usb port. Now my computer no longer recognizes the external drive After removing my external hard drive (without the ok) my computer no longer recognizes the external hard drive. What do I do.
I am trying to access my wife's macbook hard drive via my Windows computer using the Vantec SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter. The Apple techs said they could not get the drive to register when they hooked it up. However, we gave it a good drying with blow dryerThe adapter works fine and all the correct drivers installedI am in disk management and the 250GB drive seems to be showing up. However, it is not showing up in My Computer and right click shows "assign a letter" is grayed out.
My only Windows DVD was an upgrade disk I used before on the same computer a few months before. I used the command prompt on the DVD to create a NTFS partition for the OS to load onto. After that everything installed and worked fine until I tried to activate use the upgrade key, it says that it can only be for upgrading and not clean installations. I was under the impression that since I already used the key to upgrade on the computer, I would be able to use it again. Will I need to buy a new install disk or will I be able to activate the OS another way? If I do need to buy a new install disk, would it be possible for me to simply find a X16-96072 Windows 7 Home Premium iso and use the activation code that my computer came with to provide the upgrade code with?
I have an internal hard disk not in use ,and I would like to make it as external disk !I looked on the net and I found I should have the " encelsure " butt I think I wont find it here in my city .So is there another way ? like usb -esata cable
Me and my brother built me a new computer from scratch (he did the building - i did the watching). I purchased an internal hard drive from Overclockers UK. It's a Samsung 1TB drive. I also have a 64 Solid-state drive in there as my primary hard drive that Windows was installed on and a couple of programs are installed on. My storage disk (the 1TB disk) is for all my music/films etc. Whenever I drag and drop a file into the Samsung hard-drive - it copies it rather than moves it instantly.When I had a laptop, I had 3 external hard drives and this is the way it copied files onto them.how I can get the internal drive to stop acting like an external drive?
I have been running a Dual-Boot Setup of XP Pro and WIN 7 successfully for some weeks while I get familiar with Windows 7. Recently I have almost exclusively been booting into WIN 7. In this D.B. Setup The booted OS appears as Primary Partition on the C: drive with the non-active OS as "Unallocated Space " on the D: drive. This all happens on the No 1 Hard Drive. No 2 Hard Drive has been partitioned into several Partitions, the First one as a Primary Partition with the remaining Partitions as Logical drives.
Today , when I booted into WIN 7 , there was no sign of the second hard drive and its Partitions even although both drives (Serial Drives) were recognised in the initial part of the Bios screen during this bootup. When I looked in Disk Management, I saw that the first Partition on the second hard drive appeared normally as a Primary Partition but that all remaining space on this drive was shown as "Unallocated Space". I then re-booted into the XP OS . This showed the second hard drive and all its Partitions normally, i.e. with its first Partition as the Primary and all subsequent ones as Logical Drives.
It's a dell latitude, 1 year old. Laptop suddenly crashed and when the laptop booted it said: "no boot sector on internal hard drive". I tried repairing the boot sector with the windows repair function, but the hard drive is just empty... nothing to repair. Then I tried to boot off a ubuntu live cd. which worked. and showed me an empty hard drive with the_maximum_capacity_of_the_drive_GB of unallocated space.
Since that I reinstalled windows 7 two times, and stopped working after an hour or so. I installed ubuntu, which worked for several days. then i tried windows 7 again (clean install). And then I kept working on the laptop for a couple of hours until the "crash" happened. All the programs stopped working suddenly. When I opened anything I was shown this error: "Illegal operation attempted on a registry key that has been marked for deletion."
After that everything is lost if I turn the computer off. And I'm back at an empty unformatted hard drive. I changed the sata operation mode in the bios to different options before every installation of windows. I didn't try xp, because I don't have dell-xp cd's . Is the hard drive broken? I guess not because ubuntu works. and windows 7 also, but it just goes away suddenly... Here's a video (shot in portraitmode) of the event... [URL].
I don't know what is my problem because is not the first time that usb external hard drive is working fine until get damage and said " it need to be formatted " and lost all the INFO because I have to format again the disk to be usefull. Also it is not the same hard disk.
