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Checking for external hard disk errors

11 years ago

Sorry if my English is not very good ...

My OS is Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

I have a Hitachi external hard drive (where I keep all my photos) connected to my computer. A few days ago, while I was copying some files from my computer to the external drive, there was a power outage.
Since then, when I start the external drive, a Windows message appears saying that there are errors on the disk and offering to check and fix errors. Is it safe to proceed with this operation, knowing that this external drive is the only place where I keep my photos? Should I copy them back to my computer before trying to fix the errors?

Thank you very much for your help!

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Comments (7)

PRO
kbarb - San Francisco - Z10a
11 years ago
Basically it's safe and the right thing to do, imo.
If you don't run the disk check, you would risk writing new photos to a damaged area of the drive.

As long the disk's file table is not damaged, probably the worst that would happen is a few bytes or sectors have some corruption, and if you're lucky, you only have one or two damaged or irretrievable photos.

If you do lose access to the drive, there are recovery tools specifically for recovering photos, namely "PhotoRec" which works very well.

After you get everything working again, you might think about some kind of backup system so you have more than one copy of the photos.

This post was edited by kbarb on Wed, Nov 26, 14 at 16:43
emma
11 years ago
I keep copies on my computer and on my external HD. I don't like to have them stored in only one place. I think the whole point is keeping them in 2 places in case one fails.
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loum11
Original Author
11 years ago
Thank you all! My current computer is low on disk space, so I had to keep them on the external drive only. I'm getting a new computer this weekend, and I'll finally be able to keep my photos on the external drive AND on the computer. I also plan to burn my best photos on DVDs.
I'll do the check and repair tomorrow. Thanks again!
PRO
kbarb - San Francisco - Z10a
11 years ago
Let us know what happens.
My guess is you'll be ok.
But that (free) PhotoRec program is really great for recovering photos.
The same company - .cgsecurity.org - also makes TestDisk with which I've recovered many drives with lost partitions.

-Kent
loum11
Original Author
11 years ago
I have decided to do the check and repair when I have my new computer. My current one is not very stable, and I'm afraid that something goes wrong during the procedure.
But I'll come back and let you know how it went.
And thank you Kent for telling me about PhotoRec. I just hope I won't need it...
loum11
Original Author
11 years ago
Well, I did the check and repair (it was a loooong process), and now all seems to be OK. I don't know if I have lost photos (there are too many to check), but at least the error message is not there anymore. And I have copied all my photos on my new computer's hard drive, so they are now stored in two places.
Phew!
Thanks for your help!
PRO
kbarb - San Francisco - Z10a
11 years ago
That's good news !

You can check the event logs and get an idea how many errors were found, if any.
There are several tutorials out there to find the "chkdisk log" or results, but this one looks pretty good :

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/96938-check-disk-chkdsk-read-event-viewer-log.html

-Kent

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