Buffalo Forums

hi

I have a Buffalo 1TB External hard for 3 months now. recently i have noticed it makes a continuous clicking noise on pc startup. today I needed a file from the drive. I tried to enter my password and connect. It accepts my password but there is no drive letter (used to be G:) on my computer letting me to connect to the device. on my windows 7 Devises and Printers , I can see HD-LXU3 is listed and all the drivers/hardware settings show the device working properly, but no luck for me to get connected.   

Please help. 

Have you tried reassigning the drive letter in Disk management or at least trying it on a second PC?

Yes, There is no device in the Disk Management for it. however I can see a DISK 3, unknown, not initialised of 3GB listed there which is unallocated. when I unistalled it, it removed HD-LXU3 from devices and printers list which then When I reconnected it to the USB port the driver was successfully installed and again it appeared as disk 3 as unknown in the Disk Management.

on another pc the story is similar. the driver is installed successfully but the status is 'not connected'!

please help....

Then reallocate the partition in disk management.

when I try to initialise the disk, I choose MBR, but then Virtual Disk Manager returns with error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

The HDD is faulty then

Hi, yes, it is faulty and they have asked me to send it to the retailer for a replacement. but I am worried that by sending back the device I am handing over all my private data to the retailer and then to Buffalo as well. I will be worried that my private files may be restored by unauthorised people. My question is would it be possible for the company to get access to my data technically, if they want to? or because it has been encoded with a password using AES-256, it is impossible to decode the data?

Has it really encoded the whole data in AES just before writing them onto the device?

Please advise....

If you encoded the whole drive with 256bit, then even a data recovery company would not be able to recover the data without the password. Besides, when product is sent back to Buffalotech, the first step we do is remove all drives and zero-wipe them. It's illegal and unethical, to allow our employees to be exposed to customer data.

Well, this is what I want to make sure. The device was condigured to have a password. I mean every time I wanted to connect to the device I had to enter my password. Now apart from the ethical issues, I wanted to know if it is possible for the company or a third party to get around this and restore data.

I've talked with DriveSavers (one of the most experienced data recovery companies in the business) and they stated they could recover 1s and 0s from an encrypted drive, but the data would be meaningless without the password.