External harddrive problem...

[calico]

I am working on some more videos to post here and I saved the projects and videos onto an external hd so I could work on them when I was out of town.

I tried to access the drive yesterday and it tells me that the drive cannot be accessed or is corrupt. Is there anyway that I can get around this and salvage my work or should I just admit that I am screwed and give up on 10 hours of work and start over.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Reality]

Most of the external drives I have used have been SCSI based and I'm not a Windows fan, so take the following as lightly as you want.

Have you tried connecting it to multiple computers? While it's not probable, there could be an issue with the USB port and/or the drivers on the Windows box. Have you reinstalled, reloaded, etc. anything major on your computer lately?

Does the drive use a USB connection? If so, have you tried a different cable assuming it's a standard usb cable? The cable or connector at the end of the cable could be bad. Try a different USB port if you have multiple ports. If you are using USB ports on the back of the computer and it has front-side USB ports, try connecting into the front side (or just the opposite if you already use front-side USB ports for the drive).

Does it have it's own power or is it powered through USB? If it has it's own optional power supply, make sure to use it even if it works without it.

Now, for the desperation moves ...

Perhaps look for some disk repair utilities such as Norton Utilities (it's been years since I used it) or some other comparable utility. Perhaps Windows has a utility that can help built into it.

Can you remove the drive from the external case? If so, what size is the drive? Meaning, is it a laptop 2.5" drive or desktop 3.5" drive? If a desktop drive, you could put it into your computer as a slave drive and see if you have any luck accessing it that way. You can put a 2.5" drive in your desktop as well but it will require an interface that supports it.

 

[calico]

It is a drive that I built myself. It is a 3.5" drive. I might try the slave drive thing.

It was connected to my desktop via firewire and my laptop with a USB cable. I have tried it on 4 computers now and it still just will not work. The problem happened after I added all my video projects onto it while talking on the phone. I came back to the computer after its trasnfer and tried to see if everything worked and I got the error then.

I will check the utilities out that you mentioned. Thanks for your help. The bad thing is that as I was transferring the files, I said to myself that I should copy them and not move them...but I moved them...so I am SOL.

 

[JakeCamp12]

Calico, try going to the hard drive manufacter's website and downloading the diagnostic programs they have. I know Maxtor has a utility to diagnosis an ailing hard drive.

 

[kmp77]

I had an external HD and was giving me problems. It was overheating. I put it in my case and has worked great ever since. Let it cool off and put it in your case and see if that helps.

 

[calico]

thanks for tips guys. I will check out maxtor's site since that is the brand of the drive.

 

[calico]

Calico, try going to the hard drive manufacter's website and downloading the diagnostic programs they have. I know Maxtor has a utility to diagnosis an ailing hard drive.

Can you help me find that? I went to their site and think I found it, but it won't install since I don't have a disc drive on my laptop. Do you know the name of the utility?

 

[JakeCamp12]

Calico, have any luck with the Maxtor diagnostic?

 

[calico]

nope. Several programs would read the drive and scan it, but could not repair it, while others could not access the drive.

I gave up and reformatted.

 

[Yeagermeister]

nope. Several programs would read the drive and scan it, but could not repair it, while others could not access the drive.

I gave up and reformatted.

Sorry to hear that but in case you haven't figured it out yet Maxtor makes the worst hard drives. They are very slow and crash alot. I have at least 5 or 6 sitting on my desk at work that have failed this year alone.

 

[SweCowboy]

A friend of mine borrowed my external harddrive from me about a month ago. Somehow he managed to erase the partition table from the drive. This little program worked absolutely wonderful and re wrote the partition table in no time.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk_doc/GetTestDisk.html

 

[Irving Cowboy]

I know that at work a guy had his external drive hooked up to one of the lan computers (using NT) so I set permissions on the drive so that others on the drive couldn't access it. He called me last night telling me the same thing that you said, that he could not access the drive on his home computer, when I remembered that we had not stripped the permissions off before he took it home. XP will not do it, so he has to bring it back and reset the permissions with NT before he can use it at home again. Does this sound like anything you are experiencing?

 

[dback]

Another thing you can try is loading the latest ASPI drivers.

http://download.adaptec.com/software_pc/aspi/aspi_471a2.exe

ASPI is used for SCSI drives mainly, sometimes it helps to have these drivers loaded when you are transferring data through different interfaces (IDE=>USB/Firewire, etc.)

If the drive was formatted NTFS, then you need to make sure that the appropriate permissions are set on it. Remember, with NTFS you can set permissions on harware as well as files.

PM me if this doesn't make sense. I am a computer tech and can probably help you.