Hi everybody
I own a 500GB WD hdd and it ran pretty good on a USB cable for the past year or so, but recently I decided to hook it up with a Sata cable straight into the motherboard for higher speed transfer. Everything worked just perfect until I started to do some video capturing from a videocamera. After capturing some videofiles on the drive, it started to lose connection and I had to restart the PC just so that the drive would be found and recognized by the computer. Everything culminated with the message “You need to format the drive in order to be able to use it” Of course I said “no” since that would mean erasing 150GB of important data for me. I tried to reconnect it through USB port and I keep getting the same message. Since I run Vista on my desktop, I unplugged the drive and plugged it back into my laptop(XP Pro) through USB port, but to no avail. I got the same message asking me to format drive in order to be able to use it. Even though I had another ext hdd(80GB) I never backed up any data, how dumb:-( , so now I can’t access any info on the drive.
I pulled the drive out of its enclosure and reconnect it to the desktop through the SATA cable since that’s the only way to connect it outside the case and again I get the same message to format the drive. At this point I wonder if all my data is lost, or is there a way of recovering the data and restore it somewhere else. In school, I heard that freezing the drive might be a short term solution but I don’t think the drive is totally crashed.
I would really appreciate any helpful ideas from people that had similar experiences.
Doc Oc.
