| Sign in: |
| Members log in here with your user name and password to access the your admin page and other special features. |
|
|
|
|
|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Help: "disk not formatted" error with just one directory
Ryan Kelly, Student/Intern, Photographer
 |
Newport News | VA | USA | Posted: 9:41 AM on 12.09.10 |
->> Hey folks, I'm having a strange problem. I began using a new external hard drive a few weeks ago while swapping photos around between a few devices. Everything was working fine, both storing and retrieving, but now one of the folders throws the following error when I try to access it:
The disk in drive G is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?
Obviously I've selected no, because I don't want to lose the data. I get the same error after restarting the computer, using any USB port, and after testing on a different computer.
The drive: Verbatim
The computer: Sony Vaio, Windows XP
I initially formatted the drive on this computer before storing anything on it. All of the other folders operate normally, only the one specific directory throws the formatting error.
In Googling around, I found lots of instances of entire drives or partitions becoming corrupted, which makes more sense to me, but nothing about a specific directory like this.
Anybody know what's going on, or how I might be able to fix it, or at least recover the photos from that folder? I've used RescuePRO before to recover from CF cards, but it's not helpful recovering from a hard drive.
Sorry for the word vomit, just wanted to make sure I was thorough in my explanation. Thanks for any help you may be able to provide! |
|
Mike Braca, Photographer
|
Providence | RI | USA | Posted: 10:56 AM on 12.09.10 |
->> Never seen this, but here is how I'd proceed:
1. Run a full virus check - viruses can make wonky things happen
2. Run chkdisk on the drive in full /r mode:
see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265
3. Try a heavier-duty recovery program - I've used ZAR (Zero-Assumption Recovery) which you can get at:
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/
Good luck! |
|
Larry Lawson, Photographer
|
Portland | OR | USA | Posted: 11:47 AM on 12.09.10 |
->> Ryan,
WinXP has limits on partition/file size under fat32. Is the drive formatted fat32 or ntfs? If you're looking for partition sizes over 32GB, it really should be ntfs. See this article about limits in older versions of windows: http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/file-systems/understanding-file-size-li...
You mentioned testing on a different computer - what o/s?
If you're comfortable with conditional mbr formats, you might want to look into that. Is the drive a platter or flash usb? (if it's flash memory, that would be a new one on me) I've had to deal with hard drives gone south for a lot of years... it's never fun. Sorry to hear this. |
|
Ryan Kelly, Student/Intern, Photographer
|
Newport News | VA | USA | Posted: 1:15 PM on 12.09.10 |
->> Mike,
Thanks for the tips. I run regular virus checks but this was a good reminder to run Ad-Aware and Spybot again just in case. I'll try your 2 and 3 suggestions once these scans finish.
Larry,
Interesting read, thanks. However, the drive is NTFS, and flash at that. The other computer was Windows, though I'm not sure what version exactly. The drive's only ever been used on Windows machines. |
|
Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
|
Boise | ID | US | Posted: 1:56 PM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Hard drive corruption tends to happen with specific files or folders initially; the entire drive platter doesn't go bad at once. Your drive is going bad. Typically you have enough time to pull off as much data as possible. Sometimes not. |
|
Israel Shirk, Photographer, Assistant
|
Boise | ID | US | Posted: 2:24 PM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Re-reading... Is it a hard drive or a flash drive? |
|
Ryan Kelly, Student/Intern, Photographer
|
Ryan Kelly, Student/Intern, Photographer
|
Newport News | VA | USA | Posted: 3:32 PM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Mike, CHKDSK worked! Thanks so much! Out of curiosity, is there anything in particular that may have caused this problem, so I know to avoid it in the future? |
|
Larry Lawson, Photographer
|
Portland | OR | USA | Posted: 5:54 PM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Parts of the disk can get corrupt, no guessing when. chkdsk can help fix bad sectors, lost clusters, and other disk problems. They can crop up again. Keep tabs on it and if it starts happening again, shop for a new drive. They're cheap. You ARE backing this one up, right? :) |
|
Ryan Kelly, Student/Intern, Photographer
|
Newport News | VA | USA | Posted: 6:55 PM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Absolutely. Everything I need is already off this drive, not counting on it for anything important. It was small anyway, and a freebie (maybe for a reason), time to pick up a real workhorse for the future. |
|
Mike Braca, Photographer
|
Providence | RI | USA | Posted: 10:25 PM on 12.09.10 |
| ->> Glad it worked. I wasn't really suspecting a virus because it's not likely it would damage a single folder. It's possible that the folder information was not written properly if the disk drive got unplugged at the wrong time (avoidable), or my guess is, as Larry said, that the disk sector holding the information for that folder went bad (not much you can do to avoid that). |
|
Return to --> Message Board Main Index
|