hi, I’ve been here once before and people were most helpful to me trying to get virus off my computer, (unfortunately it died entirely before I finished, the power supply gave out I think,) but anyway I was wondering if anyone may be able to tell me, help me or give me any information at all on my external harddrive which has sadly seemed to depart from me as well, taking a whole half a year of uni work with it *sobs pathetically*

anyway, I started at uni doing multimedia, all on apples and because of work with film and large files. i decided to purchase an external hard rive to keep my work on, so i got a 250 gigga bite (sorry i don't know how to spell it) or something external hard drive, and because the macs were being finicky and wouldn't save to a hard drive formatted entirely as ntsf (I’m sorry I’m sure I’m getting these abbreviations wrong) my brother decided to format it in two different sections one as fat 32 and one as nstf so the macs and my pc could use it, and so i could backup my home pc on it and format that as well.

on to the problem:

Today when I was using it on my brothers computer (as mine is still dead), it my harddrive made the noise it does when I usually eject it, and wouldn't let me save my files saying it wasn't there. Which it has done to me before, but I never really thought anything of it.

I turned it off and turned it back on, which is what i have done in the past when this happens and uaually the computer just refinds it and it's worked, but this time the computer only found one of the two partitions on it and when I went to go into the fat 32 partition, all I got was a note telling me that it needed to be formatted, (to which I responded by screaming my head off and running around in circles by a good five hours.)

i believe it said along the lines of "this partition is not formatted, would you like to format now?" to which i said 'no'


I’ve tried it on my father’s pc, just in case it was this computer. But again, it just tells me, I need to format it.

I assume that the data has been corrupted on it, and the computer can’t read it.

I have plans to take it to a computer hospital tomorrow, and if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll try it on the macs at school to see if they have anymore luck reading it, but well, I’m not to hopeful to tell the truth.



Does anyone know what might be able to be done after a partition on a hard drive has become corrupted?
I'm at my wits end really, all my work was on that one drive, and if I can't recover it, I just don't know if I’m going to be able to pass and well... that's my future frankly. *rocks back and forth in the corner of the room*


If anyone could tell me why this may have happened, or any way in which I may be able to recover my files from my external hard drive, I would be really really grateful. I don't know what i'm going to do if i can't get my work back, i only have a week till it's all due, and everything was on that drive. *sighs* i'm such an idiot for not burning it to cd or something.

Sincerely
T.E.

First, try to access the hard drive through Disk Management (Start...Run...type in "diskmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter). Check it there to see it's status.

Then, you may want to try this free file recovery program to see if you can recover the data: http://www.pcinspector.de/

hi, enozym,

try running chkdsk on each partition, start, run, type cmd, and type
chkdsk /f /r x: (a space before each slash, and between r and x. substitute x for whatever your partitions are named.

also, check the website of the manufacturer of the drive, most have diagnostics you can freely download to check it out.

good luck

ps - these things can happen when usb devices aren't closed properly before removal

Thankyou both for your help, i took it to the computer hospital, but the guy there didn't know anything about it, he rang another guy who recomended trying to use a computer with linex and trying to read it with that, but i've never really heard of linex being able to look into corrupted data off things, i haven't tried that, but that PCinspector program was really just what i needed, i was able to recover a good chunk of my work off of my harddrive, and that was what was really important (seeing as it's due next week) but again thankyou for your help. I'm paranoid over ejecting my harddrive now everytime i use it.
Thanks again.

from
T.E.