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External harddisk broken?

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Ampa:
Yesterday I found my old IDE hard drive which I plugged into a USB enclosure - it worked fine, 200GB verified as OK, so I started copying files to the drive as a backup.

Then a separate activity caused my PC to lockup, and I had to hit the power switch to restart.

Now the external HD is not recognised by WinXP, Ubuntu, or any of the HD recovery apps on Hiren's Boot CD.

The drive does power up and spins without making any aweful noises, but when the OS tries to access it, merely cycles endlessly through a 4 or 5 second loop of whirs and clicks.

I've tried a 2nd USB enclosure but get the same results.

Is it really dead? It feels to me that the MBR is corrupt and I just need to find a way to reformat and all will be well?

Any ideas how to achieve this?

Shades:
Microsoft has a link that shows you how to fix a broken MBR
NTFS.com goes more into detail about it and has suggestions.

And you have the high grade stuff of course, but USD69,95 for a personal license is a bit steep for my taste...

f0dder:
Now the external HD is not recognised by WinXP, Ubuntu, or any of the HD recovery apps on Hiren's Boot CD.-Ampa (January 26, 2010, 10:46 AM)
--- End quote ---
In which way? "Not getting a drive letter" doesn't necessarily mean a FUBAR disk (but does mean partition and/or filesystem problems), whereas not showing up in Windows diskmgmt.msc does.

The drive does power up and spins without making any aweful noises, but when the OS tries to access it, merely cycles endlessly through a 4 or 5 second loop of whirs and clicks.-Ampa (January 26, 2010, 10:46 AM)
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That does actually sound like "awful noises" to me - like a stuck read/write head arm.

Ampa:
Shades: Can't get far enough to try these proceedures, as accessing the disk in anyway causes the whirring cycle.

"Not getting a drive letter" doesn't necessarily mean a FUBAR disk (but does mean partition and/or filesystem problems), whereas not showing up in Windows diskmgmt.msc does.
-f0dder (January 27, 2010, 01:13 AM)
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Drive does show up in Disk Management panel, and also in Device Manager (under Disk Drives).

It is now assigned a drive letter. (Not sure what changed!)

Both panels show the correct disk ID / Serial Number, and report the correct disk size. Disk Manager also report it as Healthy! But shows no filesystem type (should be NTFS)

Problems start when I try to do anything further... looking at the properties of the disk for example - then the whirring begins!

does actually sound like "awful noises" to me - like a stuck read/write head arm.
--- End quote ---
Is there a fix for this?

Thanks both of you for the thoughts so far.

MerleOne:
You may try to recover files using Atola PFM : http://findandmount.com/

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