I have a 500GB WD My Passport Portable Hard Drive which I couldn’t access out of the blue. The error message that pops up is saying that “Windows does not have access to the drive” or something like that.
I restarted my laptop in safe mode: command prompt and ran chkdsk i: /f and it started displaying the following:
Replacing invalid securtity id wiith defaut security id <xxx of 62xxx>
And its been going strong for a whole night now. If it really has to replace all 62000++ of them it will probably take 4 days to complete.
Should I let it run to its completion? Is there an alternative I should be considering?
My primary concerns right now are to extract important data inside (primarily my wedding photos) and don’t really care much for trying to get it to work again.
Should I let it run to its completion? Is there an alternative I should be considering?
It all comes down to peace of mind. Sure you can try to recover data with software. But what if your drive has one of the heads that is not reading properly? This could very well kill the drive by physical platter damage that nobody can fix/recover.
If you try software route, get R-studio cuz its the best out there and rather user friendly. it also has somewhat usefull imaging feature if problem is related to bad sectors, because it will let you skip them if selected. Wedding pictures is not something that anyone would like to lose. If software starts to stall or hang, don’t do anything else, just Turn off the drive and get professional data recovery help. PPL spend $2-5K on wedding photographers, and if they hire them I guess that is what those wedding pictures are worth to them. Without proper diagnostic equipotent, and imaging tools this drive could die and never be recovered. And biggest advice I can give to anyone is to keep more then a single copy of any type of data that has value. External drive is not the place to keep important things if you don’t have back up.
if you found this post usefull please give me some Kudos and good luck
Just to provide an update on my situation. The chkdsk took 3 days and didn’t do squat. I then tried recuva, R-Studio & TestDisk to no avail.
Finally I gave EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard and bam! everything’s there to be extracted. And so the wedding pictures were saved. Thanks for your help everyone!
and good luck