Recovering from data corruption on Maxtor OneTouch external hard drives
This article may help you if the following applies:
- You own a Maxtor OneTouch external hard drive.
- The drive was working correctly, but suddenly exhibited
catastrophic data failure.
- Your Windows computer does not recognize the drive when you plug
it in, or you can not mount the drive under Linux.
- The drive does NOT exhibit any physical drive failure symptoms.
This article explains how I have recovered from data corruption on the
Maxtor OneTouch external hard drives. About a year ago, I acquired
four 300GB Maxtor OneTouch II external hard drives. I used them
extensively in Linux, and one day I noticed what seemed to be like
massive data corruption on the drive. All of a sudden, all the
directory and file names were corrupted, and I could not read from any
of the files. Power cycling the drive did not help, and I could not
read it from Windows either. I thought I had lost all of the data,
but I decided to see if I could recover it using disk recovery tools.
Fortunately, I found a tool that recovered the drive without any
(apparent) data loss. The problem appears to be corruption of the
partition table, possibly due to a buggy USB/IDE interface inside the
drive enclosure. I have never encountered a similar problem with the
Maxtor (internal) hard drives themselves, but I have seen the same
corruption on both Windows and Linux platforms. The problem occurs
most often during heavy load on the disk, for example during backup
and restore.
The tool that I used is an open source program called TestDisk. It runs under both
Linux and Windows, and I have successfully used it on both. The
problem again is corruption of the partition table. The tool can
automatically rebuild the partition table by looking at the file
system. This is how I used TestDisk to rebuild it.
- Run testdisk as root in Linux
- Select "Create" a new log file
- Select the correct disk, for example "/dev/sde - 300GB / 279 GiB"
- Select "Intel" as the partition table type, assuming you have not
reformatted the drive, which should be FAT32
- Select "Analyze" current partition structure and search for lost
partitions
- It should display one partition that looks something like "FAT32
LBA"
- Select "Proceed".
- Press "Enter" again to continue
- Select "Write" to write the new partition table information
- Press "Y" to confirm
- Quit the program
- "sync" under Linux or "Safely Remove Hardware" in Windows
- Power cycle the drive
This should recover the drive, but I am not sure if data corruption
occurs in any other part of the drive except for the partition table.
My recommendation for preventing further data loss is to copy your
data to another drive (non Maxtor) and not use the drive, or store
your files in self-validating file systems or file formats on this
drive.
DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any further loss of data you may
encounter by following the above instructions. I sincerely hope you
do manage to recover your data.
Yan Ke
March 7, 2007