"The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable" (Windows 10)
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I've been experiencing problems using USB docking stations housing 3.5" internal drives using Windows 10, which has led to 11TB of data loss (6TB, 3TB and a 2TB drive). These drives have been static; i.e. I've not been hot-swapping them at all.
These disks are fully encrypted using VeraCrypt. I was using 1.23-Hotfix-2 when the problem occurred. (I didn't realise VeraCrypt was under such active development - which is great to see, and needless to say I shall now check more often for updates.) I have other disks (external USB drives and those directly connected via SATA) but the common denominator is that these inaccessible drives have all been docked in these docking stations.
Windows would seemingly randomly report that there was a problem with the drives housed in the docking stations and inform me that it would try and fix on the next reboot. Failing to find the option in Windows to cease this activity, I would delay the reboot for as long as I could but eventually Windows would decide on its own to reboot and then the drive would then become inaccessible. Upon shutdown, I'd sometimes remove the drive to keep it away from Windows, but it would eventually catch me out later on.
VeraCrypt accepts my password and mounts the drives, but instead of showing the volume label, the drive would show up as if a new drive had been plugged in, showing as a 'local disk' with its assigned drive letter.
Trying to browse the disks contents generates the following error:
I:\ is not accessible
The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.
Around 3 months ago, I built my own Ubuntu Disk Recovery Suite containing all the disk utilities I could find. This enabled me to make copies of the drives, use VeraCrypt (command line version and GUI) to mount the drive, and use the TestDisk utility to try and recover the data. Having spent many hours on this, it wasn't too successful and so I gave up but having said that I wouldn't say I was 100% confident in knowing what I was doing so might have missed something.
Using the option to recover the backup header in VeraCrypt, it reports it has been successfully restored but the error persists.
When using 'check filesystem' feature within VeraCrypt, the following is reported:
"The type of file system is NTFS
Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted"
Putting it down to these USB docking stations, I have since built myself a server with DAS storage. It has come to the point where I was going to reuse these disks in the DAS (I'm sure they are physically ok) and so I thought I would have one last attempt to recover the data. This is when I noticed there were newer versions of VeraCrypt. I have since installed the newest version, but alas, the disks are still inaccessible.
I read on one forum to try and use the utility PhotoRec, which is bundled with TestDisk, to try and recover the data, and to my surprise it started to pull files from one of the drives so the data seems to still be on the disks. Some of the files seem ok; however some are just fragments (e.g. 30 seconds of a longer home movie which contains visual artefacts where the screen and sound is clearly corrupted).
I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how they would go about recovery in this scenario? I did also try TestCrypt but it couldn't see anything at all. PhotoRec is an option but I'd rather use that as a last resort if anyone has any ideas for me to try.
Appreciate any advice on this. Many thanks in advance.
Last edit: Paul 2020-04-04
You can try using other data recovery tools like EaseUS Data Recovery or R-Studio.
Free versions may have limitations on file scans and/or size.
Thank you very much for your response. I certainly had decent results from R-Studio in the past over all the others.
However, I'm going to look a bit further into getting this disk fixed before I go down that particular route. I've just made a copy of the 3TB drive so will experiment with that a little before I do.
Same problem here after powerloss and a new docking station (no problems with hdds that are part of the computer when powerloss).
Did you have any success?
Thanks - Enomine