BleepingComputer.com: My External Hard Drive Won't Open

Hey everyone!

I'm new here, first-time posting. I was wondering if you all could help me out with something. If you could, it would be seriously appreciated :-)

Several months ago I bought a 250GB external WD hard drive. It was working fine up until a few days ago when I was prompted to format it. I transferred everything onto another hard drive and did a quick format--which didn't take long at all, then re-transferred all files back onto it. It was still working all right.

Yesterday I plugged it in and it wouldn't open. If I clicked on the icon (I had named my hard drive something but it only showed up on My Computer as "Local Disk G:/" ) everything would freeze up. And then I was told it couldn't be opened because of an I/O error.

How do I fix this? I really hope I could access the info on this drive--I don't have it backed up anywhere else and it would kill me if all the stuff I have on it is gone. Thanks in advance!!!!

Speaking from experience, either a contact is loose or the hard drive has died. Happened to me and i lost all my data.

You can try recovery software, Data recovery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery

Louis

Thanks for your replies!

Verion: Ouch that sucks. Heh, I've got over 100GB of stuff on this thing, so I really hope that death of the hard drive isn't the case here. *Crosses fingers*

Hamluis, thanks for the link. I'll look into the data recovery. I think I'll send the hard drive to my dad's office and see if his IT people can fiddle with it and recover anything. At this point I don't give a damn if the hard drive will never work again, so long as my information is okay.

Thanks you two! Are there any other suggestions out there?