I’ll post the same information that I sent to Plugable today just incase someone out there had a similar problem.
The control board on my drive went bad and thought I’d take a chance purchasing your “Communicator U3 SATA Hard Drive Docking Station.”
The first time I plugged everything together - after about 5-10 minutes - I saw my OneTouch drive and the complete file directory that was on it. YAY!!!
So I shut everything down and got ready to transfer files off the OneTouch to a more reliable platform - namely another remote hard drive. That’s when the trouble started.
When I tried to duplicate accessing the One Touch drive thru the Communicator I kept getting messages that the drive needed to be formatted. I never saw the directory or even the name of this hard drive as I did the first time.
I’m assuming there is something I’m not doing right since it worked right the first time… hoping you could share some insight.
I am running a Sony Vaio laptop computer with Windows 7. At the moment I have no other peripherals attached… trying to isolate the problem.
Thanks
We worked with Mike via our email ticketing system on this issue.
To recap for the benefit of others who might come across this while researching:
-We suggested running Seatools on the drive to ensure it was mechanically in good shape. (In most cases, a drive that lost it’s filesystem is a sign of impending drive failure.)
-The Seatools scan reported many errors, even on the “short” test.
-As a result of (presumably) bad sectors, the filesystem data had become corrupted, resulting in the drive showing up as “RAW”/unformatted.
Options at this point depend heavily on how important the data on the drive is.
-If data is extremely important, it’s time to speak to a data recovery specialist, either nationally (Drive Savers/OnTrack) or locally.
-If data is of the “I’d prefer not to lose it, but it’s not worth spending hundreds of dollars on sending my drive in for data recovery” variety: There are a few different data recovery software tools which specialize in viewing drive contents and copying data from a failing drive.