External Hard Drive Problems

[aces_high_4]

A year or so ago I bought a 400GB external hard drive. For about the first 7 months it worked like a treat and I never had any problems with it. Then all of a sudden I started to get problems when trying to start it up.

I wrote to the people that I bought it from, and they sent me a new power supply. They assured me that this would fix the problem. Sure enough they were right and the drive worked fine again without any loss of data. A couple of months later the same problem happened again and I decided to just buy a new caddie/case rather than write to the seller again. This time I went for one that was quite expensive and once again the problem was solved.

I have now had it for over a year and there seems to be a problem again although this time it isn't the casing. I have tried a new case which didn't work and I put another hard drive in the caddie and it works. This has brung me to think there is a problem with the hard drive. When I turn it on I get a F:/ drive appear whereas before, when it worked, I would get 2 partitions F:/ (about 300GB partition) and G:/(about 100GB partition). If I right click on the F:/ drive and go to properties it tells me that the drive has no used space and no free space. When I double click on it, it tells me that the drive needs formatting. If I do go in to the format screen it tells me the drive is 250GB.

On the hardware side the drive is spinning and there are no clicking sounds. Also giving the underneath the once over the circuit board has no obvious problems.

I really do hope you can help me with this because there are a lot of irreplaceable personal files (photos, college work etc) on the hard drive and I don’t have £600 to pay for expert assistance. Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

[GDH]

Hi,

It is difficult to say what is causing your problems.

I suggest you try Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles.com.

Install the program on your C: drive and then run a Fast Format Recover. In the drive selection window, select and search the "physical drive" (you should be able to tell which one it is by the size). This search should take less than 30 minutes to run. Please let me know the results.