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120GB External Western Digital HDD issue

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5 replies

by paulbelliard

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I have had a 120GB External Western Digital HDD for about 3 years now. I have save a lot of information on it. All of a sudden windows is telling me that it is not formatted and it needs to be formatted. I would like to salvage the information I have saved before formatting it. Is there any utility out there that will let me back up all the information before me formatting it? I can't even get access to it because windows tells me to format it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank You.

5 replies

by husp1

trying linux on a live disc? or even a full linux box for that matter? might be somthing with your windows box and not the drive.

by husp1

this one. Heard of port spacific drives? did you change the usb or serial port. a pal o mine had this issue. only recognized his external cd-rw on the rear usb port. (don't know why I didn't think of that earler, age must be showing, lol.)

by dr dij

try on a 2nd pc?
you didn't say how it was hooked up - firewire, usb2..?

drives can die in 3 years but you likely would have had signs of failure, such as noise, intermittent disk access to part of drive, etc.

viruses or trojans can un-format drives or wipe out directory sectors. have you kept virus sw up to date and run scans recently?

for one of these, it only wipes out 1st copy. see grc.com there is a util that grabs 2nd backup copy of directory if that is the problem.

by dawgit

You didn't say what OS you were using. The OS could have limits & 'think' & 'see' your HD as full (even Win2k has a limit as what it sees as
drive space) Be VERY Carefull! When Windows sees
a drive as full, it bumps it to a 'raw' format. (I've had that several customers computers already) Then you're seriously into recovery of Data. 1st I agree with the other (more learned) in the discusion; check the HD with another Computer. If that don't work try also another external HD housing. It could be just the controler or power supply inside the Housing (they're not as durable as the HD). I hope it helps. -dawgit

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