Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Recovering My External HDD

Mar 12, 2005 7:14AM PST

Hello,
One night I left Eraser running, which was erasing the unused disk space on my Western Digital External Hard Drive. The next morning when I came back to the computer the program had finished, but when I tried accessing the HDD i found that i could not, I kept getting the
error: D:\ is inaccessable The file or directory is corrupted or unreadable. Can anyone help me try to fix this problem? I've been to the Eraser website and they don't have anything on this type of thing. And Before I try using some sort of Hard Drive Recovery tool, I wanted to ask the community for help.

Any advice and help is greatly appreciated, along with any recommendations for Recovery tools.

I have:
Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2
Eraser 5.7
Dell Inspiron 8100
1.2 GHz processor
512 Megs of SDRAM

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
What is Eraser?
Mar 13, 2005 1:49PM PST

What is Eraser and what does it do? How can you erase blank space? Is it some kind of secure shredder? If so, there is no way to recover the data because it was written over.

- Collapse -
Eraser
Mar 14, 2005 2:36AM PST

Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and DOS. What I did was select to have all of the unused disk space on my external HDD written over several times.

- Collapse -
It appears to work.
Mar 14, 2005 2:44AM PST

But think over that you are accelerating the demise of the drive or data. At the very least, you would not do this to a drive that had your only copy of the unified field theorem or such.

Did you try the usual of pulling the drive out and trying alone on the second IDE channel?

Bob

- Collapse -
Might as well format...
Mar 14, 2005 11:10AM PST

External drives are much less reliable than internal. You might as well format the thing and hope it still works. Chances are, it won't. Why are you writting over free space anyway? What kind of secret data do you have on there that need secure shredding? Just think of this as one of life's little lessons. Live'n learn... ^_^

- Collapse -
Try running Restorer2000
Mar 26, 2005 8:17AM PST

I have encountered the same problem with my external Maxtor 5000 after I had to power recycle my notebook.

I have done research on data recovery tools and am running Restorer2000 to recover my files. The disk seems to be in a perfect operational condition.