I was going to do some backups when one of my backup drives failed. Windows Explorer showed the drive letter but when I tried to access it, Windows claimed it was to corrupt. Couldn't even run check disk on it. Tried it in another computer with the same results. I was thinking of scraping this drive but I decided to try one more thing.
I have MiniTool Partition Wizard 12 intsalled and I know it has some hard drive utilities built in so I decided to give it a shot.
Download MiniTool Partition Wizard: www.partitionwizard.com
With my drive plugged in with an USB adapter I opened the program.
So the first postive thing that I noticed is that the program detected and display the drive in question. In my example, Disk 4 (F:).
I right-clicked on the drive and found the option to Check File System.
A window opened an in the options section I selected to Check & fix detected errors.
Then I clicked on Start. It scanned the drive and found some errors and was successful in repairing them.
I have my drive back. To be sure the drive isn't damaged. I right-clicked again on the F: drive and this time chose the option to do a Surface Test.
Over three and one half hours, and the test came out clean. No problems detected. Well if it comes down to it, I usually make multiple backups, so I'm covered there.