External hard drive not working (details inside) 1

[Eilistraee]

I don't know if I did something to it, or if it just stopped. It's a USB2 40 gig from Acomdata. It has it's own power supply and I turned it off (as I have done before). Later when I turned the drive on, it would not work.

If I try to explore using My Computer (I use XP, btw) it says it is not accessible "disk structure is corrupted and unreadable". Properties lists the file system as RAW with 0 bytes of used and 0 bytes of free space.

I'd really like to recover the files I had (weren't backed up yet, as I just recently got it, and hadn't finished moving them from the internal HD; know I should've backed them up, but it's too late now) but it's far more important to find out if the HD can work again.

I've tried calling the manufacturere for help (at least to find out if it's gone for good) but have gotten nothing but a busy signal. And there's no e-mail contact that I could find on their webpage.

Norton Utilites' system information screen shows the HD in the hard disks section.

 

[mijan]

I think the file system is damaged in some way, its possible the fat is damaged or the MFT are damaged. if i were you i would not write to the disk under any circumstances if the data is important to you but make a copy of the drive and try any recovery tools on the copy. if this fails then at least you can send the drive to a recovery company, try

http://www.computer-recovery.com

if you have to.

 

[roamer1]

mijan is correct, but it may be that the system is not reading the data properly. chek for warnings and stops in the device manager, observe any faults in the event viewer.

it might be worth a try to remove the drive from it's external case and plugging it directly into an IDE port on the MB. If it functions properly from there it would indicate fault in one of the drivers that allow communication to the external device (ATAPI, USB, etc) or a cable/hardware issue in the external device itself.

Check your External Device's docs- some cannot handle being turned on/off except from a cold boot. That might corrupt data, or may just need to boot properly to "see" it right.

 

[crwpulsar]

As roamer1 said, the device is external so bring it a friends house and try it there,Also since you were talking about the power, Are the Lights on the front on???
David

 

[lanamater]

There are recovery tools available such as ERD Diskcommander from

http://www.winternals.com

that can recover data from most any sort of disk problem (i.e. crashes, formatting, deleted files, even deleted volumes etc.)

I have used this many times and have had pretty good success from it. But as mijan said, do not try to write to the disk as it will probably write over data that is potentially recoverable.

 

[Eilistraee]

Thanks for the suggestions; I will definitely fllow up on them.