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I'm having problems with an external FireWire disk. It worked last time I connected it, but now it doesn't. I have tried an alternative cable.

Disk Management looks like this:

Part of Disk Management interface

None of the Disk Management commands does anything, except for "Offline" and then "Online".

I instantly thought "CHKDSK". Problem is that the drive doesn't even exist. I found advice online about MOUNTVOL. So I tried CHKDSK for both the volume GUIDs which were listed with no drive letter - but these seem to be "hidden" or recovery volumes on the disks which do work.

Event Viewer shows errors with Source "disk", error message: The device, \Device\Harddisk2\DR2, has a bad block.

Sure, that's not surprising. But how do I even try to fix it when Windows doesn't seem to even be treating this disk as existent, even at a low level? Every bit of advice I can find from an online search seems to be about a Dynamic invalid disk, not one which is showing "Errors" and not even online.

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I'm sure Microsoft will have tools to diagnose this type of problem, I prefer 3rd party though.

First decide what's more important: Access to data (data recovery) or in situ repair. This will decide the approach.

If this is about data recovery:

  • Determine the drive's health status using SMART. Just examine current state, do not run any kind of scans.
  • Image the drive (sector by sector) using a tool designed to do so. So not a backup type disk imaging tool but for example ddrescue. If something happened to resulted in data loss, we must always assume the underlying cause is a (physical) drive problem.
  • Analyse the disk image file and recover the data.

If goal is in-place repair

  • Try to get an idea about what's wrong with the drive / partitions
  • Determine if it's fixable. Not all logical damage can be repaired, even if cause is known. Dynamic disks use a small data base to keep track of partitioning, some times, like with Simple Dynamic Volumes we can ignore this database and 'convert' the drive to a different partition scheme.

I personally find the tool DMDE a good place to start whatever the approach. By just selecting the drive the tool will provide you with an overview of current partitioning and also in most cases an overview of partitions that are not currently defined. See for example: https://superuser.com/a/1782757/705502

Note that any in-place repairs potentially make things worse. You already mentioned chkdsk: While it can help you repair a volume, I know of plenty examples in which chkdsk made a situation actually worse.

It also allows you to 'open' lost volumes/partitions which is a convenient way to determine if data is recoverable at least.

Superuser is a great place, but this type of issue may require a more interactive approach where you provide results of some tool and 'expert' provides advice with next steps based on that. I find the sub reddit r/datarecovery a good place for this type of approach.

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