Hi everyone. I will try to explain this the best I can.
I have a 250gig External Hard drive, USB 2.0, that is a few years old. I never had any problems with this drive at all until recently. A few weeks ago, I brought the external to a friends house. We just needed to use the enclosure for a different hard drive. So we took MY drive out, put the other drive in, did what we needed to do. I put my drive back in the enclosure. When I went to use it again at home, it was acting funny. It does not make any loud noises or anything like that, but it was just being slow. Then a few days later it was painful to try to load anything off of it. I thought that the enclosure may have been damaged while at the friends place, so I bought a new enclosure. Unfortunately, that did not help the problem. The drive powers up fine, and Windows (XP) detects it. It shows up in My Computer. But I can’t access it at all. It is partitioned in to 2 parts. Drives I: and J: When I click on I: it asks me if I want to format – when I click on J: it tells me the “parameters are incorrect.”
The drive went from working fine to working at a limited capacity to now not really being able to be accessed at all. I was advised to use SpinRite by a friend. But I am using a lap top (Sony Vaio PCG-GRT100P) and I am unsure of how the process works. I know I have to boot from a CD with SpinRite – but then what? Will it work on the external drive? Someone told me to pop the drive into a tower and then to use SpinRite, but will that work considering there is no OS on the drive? What would happen after I boot from CD with my external in a tower? And how will I know if it’s working or not?
I just want to be able to get this drive working long enough to salvage maybe 20 gigs worth of stuff. Which for the time being I can just put on the internal HD and then burn later. Mostly just pictures, sentimental stuff.
Does anyone have any advice for me?
THANK YOU!
