Help With External Hard Drive Failure

[COL]

I came across this site and saw that you helped with similar external hard drive problems but I don’t see an exact solution to my problem. I have an external 400 GB hard drive and it failed while I was transferring files. A window popped up that said it cannot transfer the files during the transfer, so I pushed the cancel button to stop it. It closed the transfer window and then froze up the computer. It sounded like the external hard drive was still writing and spinning so I waited a few minutes to see if that was the problem. Nothing happed, so I restarted. After the reboot I found that the external hard drive no longer worked the same. In My Computer it would show as an unformatted RAW drive with no free space and no space used (during the transfer it was about one-third filled). So I tried to use the Widows XP programs like format, scan disk, and disk defragmenter since the files weren’t as important as the drive (this is a second external hard drive I use with same size, make, and files on it but not used at the same time) and none would of those programs would work. In device manager it shows it connected on the usb list, and as a drive. But I can’t do anything with it in the manger, like formatting, either. So I looked for a program to use. I download the Recover My Files program (only the free one) just to see if it could recover the partition, master boot record, or the master table file, or what ever I had corrupted. After I download from your website, I went to try it and found something new. It took a few minutes after plugging in my drive for it to recognize the drive and made noises it hadn’t previously made, like clicking and accelerating of the drive. While using the program it listed the external drive as drive 1 with 0 MB on it since I have one internal drive. When trying the quick partition recover it would freeze the program and after a few minutes of nothing, Windows would pop up with a window saying the program is not responding. The drive made normal sound like it does during normal file transfer while I used the Recover My Files program. After that I tried it on the other drives (my regular internal and other external) to see if the program did what I wanted, it worked on those drives. Will this program fix this problem, or is it a hardware problem that needs a hardware tech?

[GDH]

Hi,

It sounds like a hardware problem to me.

The first thing to try is to make sure you change the external connecting cable and you can even go as far as to take the drive out of the external drive bay and connect it directly to your PC. Often it is not actually the drive that has gone bad but the connecting equipment in between. If you do this and you still hear strange noises then you know the hard drive has a physical problem and needs hardware data recovery.

[KatDunit]

Hi there...

I have a similar problem as the guy above. I have an Lacie brick 350gb external. I recently was transferring data, was told of an error & was unable to continue. I clicked ok & all seemed fine...once I did an xp update & restarted the computer no longer recongised the device, although it stated in my system hardware that it was funtioning correctly, when ever I attempt to open it I recieve the following error: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

Although I can do a data recovery there is noway my computer has the space to hold all of the data from the device, so i was kinda hoping someone could help with hardware recovery or at least point me in the right direction!

I'll get a round in if someone can help please.

[GDH]

The partition information on this drive sounds like it has been screwed around.

There a drive repair tools avaialble on the internet that will attempt to fix your drive and get it working again. However, be warned, that if they do not work they can very easily make the problem worse and make data recover much more difficult.

For example, the file and folder name of every file on your drive is held in a table at the start of the disk called the MFT table. If the MFT records get destroyed, then you will not be able to recover with original names and it will make the recovery of fragmented files on you disk almost impossible.

If the data on the drive is important to you then my suggestion is that you recover the most important files first before you try an "fix" the drive.

[KatDunit]

hey thx...

Files arent so much important, oh hum i guess I should take off brothers wedding photographs , he may be annoyed otherwise!

Any suggestions on decent driver repair tools? Guess I should start recovering files. Thx again!