So a friend had her external hard drive 'die'. It is a SATA drive in a USB enclosure. When I plugged it into both Mac and Win7 machines, both OS's asked for the drive to be initialized. Figuring there was a problem with the MBR, I ran a restore on SpinRite to see if I couldn't recover the problem sectors and save the drive. SpinRite saw the errors but was unable to recover them. Win7 is still asking the drive to be initialized. Is there anyway to save what data is still on the drive? Anyone have any experience with any situations like this?
Usually, what breaks on USB external HDD, is the USB controller. Open it up, and connect the HDD to your desktop. See if that works. Else, your HDD is really broken.
Try freezing it, type HDD freezing into YouTube, or look it up on Linus tech tips YouTube channel, and he has a video guide of him freezing one of his own hard drives, if that or what goodbytes said doesn't work (try what goodbytes said first though) and use the freezing thing as a last resort
I've tried it in the original enclosure and a backup enclosure I had laying around. Both with the same error. I'll yank the drive and stuff it into the desktop tonight to see if that has any changes. It's not the click of death problem, just what looks like some bad sectors in the MBR that is screwing with the data that was stored there so I don't think the freezing trick would do anything for me unfortunately.
Could you not try a quick "fixmbr" command? (Sorry don't know the windows 7 equivalent of this XP tool) Its saved my Bacon a few times.
FixMBR might work (instructions here), otherwise ChkDsk /r may also work, though I suspect SpinRite performed very similar operations as the aforementioned ChkDsk. Failing that, the hard drive may be done for and hopefully she has a backup. This has happened to me a few times and it's extraordinarily aggravating. I sympathize.
