Question

Repairing Disk Geometry Errors

Hard drive repair, Hard drives, Backup & recovery

I have a WD 300 GB drive that I was using as a portable drive in a USB2 enclosure. The drive worked fine for almost 3 years. All of a sudden I'm having trouble accessing certain folders on the drive. I thought the drive was failing and got my photos (the most important) off of the drive. Next I went for my VERY extensive MP3 collection. It failed every time. I grabbed my Spinrite disk, booted up and spinrite blew through the 300GB in about 4 seconds. At that point I knew something was wrong. I threw partition magic (an older version) at it and it kicked back an error. Number 108, partition doesn't end at end of cylinder. I've researched and learned that this can be caused by the BIOS settings of a machine other that the one it was created on. I've since taken an older PC and put the drive in it to try to fix the problem. I've run a couple of surface scans and the drive appears to be free from defects, just the partition geometry is blown out. I said it found 240 cyl and should be 255. My main question is, am I screwed? I still have a ton of stuff I'd like to save. Does anyone have any suggestions? I've seen a lot of ideas based on a new install or the like, but this drive has a bunch of stuff I'd rather not loose. One more thing, if I repartition and reformat, will Easy Recovery or something similar be able to recover my data?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

You may want to limit experimenting with this drive and start looking into data recovery alternatives such as DTI Data (see: www.dtidata.com) and OnTrack (see: www.ontrack.com) instead. In addition to data recovery services, each offers software products to help recover data without having to use their professional services offerings. I have used DTI's softwarein the past on a failing hard drive with a high rate of success but your mileage may vary.

I would not try anything invasive such as re-partitioning or reformatting the drive without first cloning a copy of the drive, provided that you can make one in its present state.