help:external drive corrupted

i have an external drive and i put some of my most important files and all my music files in it.i connected the drive to my pc and after sometime it freezed.After a lot of struggle the condition did not get any better,i could not "safely remove" my drive and so i just pulled it out and restarted.
next time when i connected the external drive,one of its 2 partitions were corrupted and almost all my files were in that partition.

Is there anything that can be done?i will really appreciate it from my heart if anyone can help.

 

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External's are difficult with the newer Windows OS's because the newer OS's require doing a SCANDISK during a bootup operation (prior to the loading of an operating system or accesses to a harddrive).

Considering for the most part that external drives through USB require drivers, which in turn means the OS needs to load up those drivers for access. It means turning to a Third Party program to attempt to fix the problem, if of course it can't run without using the bootup method.

I guess what you could try doing is connecting your external drive and right click it's icon for the drive (i.e. drive E

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, select properties and under tools see if there is a way (Error-Checking) to check for drive errors like you would with a normal drive.

Let it run it's course and then you could consider doing a defrag on it.

If you can't get the OS to do it, then we'll have to look at third party tools to do the job. I'd also suggest you might look into doing a virus scan, there are a few viruses that will attempted to corrupt removable media partitions if they get on your system, so your drive might actually be suffering an infection.

 

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You can run file recovery software on it.

No sweat you'll get the data back. You can recover your stuff even after a format and repartition.

There are pay version and free versions. My pick for one that is the most powerful and sophisticated is $79, RTT R-Studio.

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If you MUST have the stuff free do some research.

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@Stryder
Although i didn't get all of what you explained,but i got the gist.
So basically you are saying that i should scandisk for errors and then do a defrag?ok.
i don't think it's a virus because i formatted my computer pretty recently.Or are you saying that there is a virus in the external disk itself?that is not impossible, i guess.

Currently i can't even access that partition.will checking the disk for errors enable me to access it?i will try it.the bad news is that i found many of the files in the other partition are also damaged,but more than half are alright.i am trying to back up those files first.

@Dr Mabuse
i really don't have much money to spend.
but i downloaded a few free recovery files,thanks for the link.
i have a question though ,do i need to right click and format the partition fisrt?i mean currently i can't even access the partition.
worse still,i found that many of the files in the other partition are damaged/unreadable.can recovery files help me recover the damaged files to a non-damaged state?that will be helpful.

Anyway,thank you guys for the help.

 

Try the software before doing anything else. The software can see data the OS can't.

 

I'm guessing that there could be a Virus (a Boot Virus) that has been slowly corrupting your partition everytime you used the drive. It's very similar to the old Boot.Parity.B virus that use to corrupt floppies (albeit when caught early they were easily removed, it's just the damage isn't so easy to fix since a virus randomly zeroing bytes [Which isn't Boot.Parity.b] has a habit of messing systems up.)

Such boot viruses used floppies back then, I'm suggesting that external drive (and pen drives) could have such a virus written to them. It would explain the destruction of Data and of the Partition corruption.

Of course there are other factors for partition corruption like the damage to an external drive through carrying it. It could of taken a bump.

All I can suggest is once you've pulled off as much data as you can, you'll have to go through the process of formatting. Obviously formatting the partition that exists isn't going to clean your boot record, so you might well have to remove the partition and then re-create the partition anew, I can't really suggest how you would do that as I'd only really dabble in working that out if I too was in the same boat.

 

If the partition is gone, scandisk through windows won't work. As Dr. M said, you will need a partition recovery program.

 

A virus???

Where did you get that notion?

Read ahead caching was accessing the drive, the system froze, the cache was never resolved back to the drive, the partitions corrupted.

Happens all the time.

This is why many people disable the windows caching and crap on external drives, so this can't happen.

 

Like I said there is always the chance of a virus. Yes drives can hang and problems can arise, however Partition viruses are old hat and back in fashion.

 

A virus that ignores the System partition on the main drive, and goes for the external partitions only in part?

I don't follow that logic.

 

Dr Mabuse,
Imagine you use the drive on an infected machine, it attacks all partitions, however when using it on your normal machine you might have some Anti-virus guard blocking it infecting the system. That's the basic logic for what you are querying.