A family in Wokingham came back from three weeks away, plugged the drive into the television to watch the photographs, and had a very pleasant evening. The following morning the same drive on the same family's Windows machine offered to format itself and would show nothing. They spent a week plugging it into everything in the house, which is how they arrived at the sensible conclusion that the television could see something Windows could not.
| Media | An external hard drive holding several years of family photographs and video. A television plays the contents without difficulty; a Windows PC will not read the drive at all. |
| What was reported | External hard drive, photographs and video play fine when plugged into a TV, Windows PC will not read it and offers to format, owner has tried several different devices, recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Logical, and confined to what Windows needs. The drive was healthy and the data was intact, which the television demonstrated. The partition table entry Windows relies on had been damaged, leaving the volume unmountable on a PC while a simpler device reading the filesystem directly still found the files. |
| On the bench | Read behind a hardware write blocker with the format prompt refused, imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in one pass, the partition table and the filesystem parsed from the image in R-Studio with UFS Explorer used as a second reading independent of Windows, the damaged partition entry reconstructed, photographs and video validated by playing and rendering them, everything written to fresh media. |
A television is a simpler reader and that is why it worked. It looks for media files and it is tolerant of structures that Windows insists on. Where Windows refuses to mount a volume whose partition entry does not add up, a set-top reader will often walk the filesystem anyway and play whatever it finds.
Two devices disagreeing is a diagnosis in itself. If the hardware were failing, nothing would read it. The drive spun, responded and served files to the television all evening, so the fault has to sit in a structure that only one of the two devices actually consults.
The format prompt is the dangerous part of this story. Windows offers it because it cannot interpret the volume, and accepting would write a fresh partition table and a fresh empty filesystem over the top of a drive that is currently full of holiday photographs. The offer appears every time the drive is plugged in, which is a lot of chances to click the wrong thing.
A week of trying devices was not free. It did no direct damage, since none of those devices wrote anything, but it is worth saying that each attempt on Windows is another opportunity for somebody in the household to accept a prompt in a hurry. The moment two devices disagree, stop plugging it in.
It went behind a hardware write blocker first, which removed any possibility of a prompt being accepted by accident. The drive profiled as healthy, with a short defect list and full read speed, and was imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in a single pass.
Everything after that happened on the image. R-Studio parsed the partition table and found the entry Windows needed damaged while the filesystem behind it was largely intact, which matched the television's behaviour exactly. UFS Explorer was used as a second, independent reading to confirm the geometry before the entry was reconstructed. Photographs were rendered and a sample of the video played through before the set was written to fresh media.
Every photograph and every video came back, along with a folder of documents nobody had realised was on there. The recovered set went home on a drive formatted so that both the PC and the television can read it, which was the point of the exercise.
One drive, £300 + VAT. No part was replaced and the drive was never opened, so this was logical work under no fix, no fee, invoiced once the family had watched a sample of their own footage.
Take that disagreement seriously and stop plugging it in. It is good news, because it means the data is present and the hardware works, and it is also a countdown, because the machine that cannot read it keeps offering to fix it. Refuse the format. Refuse the repair. Do not let anybody in the house click through a dialogue to make it go away. Do not use the television or a media player to reorganise anything either, since some devices will helpfully create folders or index files on a drive they can write to. Unplug it, put it somewhere out of the way, and have it imaged, because reconstructing a partition entry from a copy is straightforward and undoing a format is not.
These files are written up from genuine enquiries taken from households and businesses in Bracknell, across Berkshire and Surrey and into London, with names, firms and anything else identifying stripped out. Each one sets down how the fault was reasoned through, the method it actually needed and the equipment it was worked on. One of them is a job that was turned away, which belongs here as much as the rest of them.
An interrupted write leaves the volume inconsistent, so the drive letter survives and the files behind it do not
Windows reporting a healthy device is a statement about hardware and says nothing about the filesystem on it
A single bad partition on a drive whose other partitions still work is a structure fault, and deleting the table is not the fix
Examining it is free and takes 2 working days from arrival, the figure goes to you in writing and does not move afterwards, and a logical fault carries no fix, no fee. Start online or ring the freephone.