Help!!! External Hard Disk Corrupted and Unreadable

Download the diagnostics program from the manufacturer's site and run it. It will tell you if the drive is bad or not.

I can't stress enough about making backups. Acronis makes a very good tool and it is fairly cheap. http://www.acronis.com

You can run the command-line [i]chkdsk.exe[/i] on your external hard drive. The [b]F[/b] parameter will [i]fix[/i] errors.

If the external hard drive letter is [b]E[/b], type the following in the Run menu or the DOS command prompt:

chkdsk.exe E: /F

Hope this helps.

Rick/Portland, OR

At your Uni try and see it you can access the drive with another computer. If the same error message comes up then get the drive copied to another drive. Take the drive in question to a person who knows how to extract the data from your drive. If they do a muck up of the drive then at least you will still have a backup.

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.

Safely Remove Option in Windows.

If you fail to safely remove any USB Device it will eventually corrupt the Partition information.

That's the why now for a solution you need to take the drive to someone who can do Data Recovery and use something like On Tracks Easy Recovery Tool which will rebuild the Partition Information on the Drive. There is another possibility available and that is to recover the files one at a time but this is both time consuming and depending on the circumstances not overly reliable.

If you want to try it yourself there are numerous Data Recovery Applications available but the more that you do now the less likely you are to be able to recover things if you mess it up. Also you need to remember if you try this yourself that you [b]Can Not[/b] save any recovered data to the same drive as it may overwrite Data making it impossible to recover.

Before starting anything you should test the Drive to make sure that it hasn't failed or been bumped while running this can destroy HDD very quickly. Download the Drive Makers Testing Utility and test the drive for function. If you don't know the Drive Makers Name Sea Tools will do to test but if it gives a Error Report it may not be accurate.

http://tinyurl.com/yvq99t

Here is a short list of the better Data Recovery Software available.

http://tinyurl.com/273ay5

http://tinyurl.com/rmvrv

http://tinyurl.com/yvrsl

http://tinyurl.com/yyk8cm

http://tinyurl.com/382vm

http://tinyurl.com/ynwnel

http://tinyurl.com/nc4kx

http://tinyurl.com/2wox7l

http://tinyurl.com/374d8b

http://tinyurl.com/djw6u

http://tinyurl.com/f73se

http://tinyurl.com/8bd3f

http://tinyurl.com/afu2j

While the last 2 are from the same company they are very different products. Win Hex should only be considered foe use by someone who knows Hex Inside Out while Davory is a great cheap General Purpose Application.

Personally I prefer the On Track Option but it's anything but cheap. However because I use this type of software a lot it's paid for itself many times over by now, for a cheaper option Spin Rite from Gibson Research or Stella have both very good reputations by other TR members.

Col