External Hard Drive Problems

I have a 500gig Western Digital external hard drive and it's having some serious problems.

When I have it plugged in, everything in the start menu and my computer screen takes forever to load.

When you finally do get a chance to open it an error comes up that say's it is not formatted. I've tried it on two different computers and the same thing happens.

Is there a good (free?) program to get the files off of the drive before I format it? The file format is Fat32 if that makes a difference.

Thanks for any help / advice

Hi .

It's possible that your situation arises from the fact that you are booting your system with the USB-device attached and on. I would suggest trying to boot with the device powered off or unattached (some external drives do not have on/off switch).

It's also possible that the enclosure is failing, while the hard drive (inside the enclosure) is fine. If it were me, I would remove the actual hard drive from the enclosure and attach it directly (temporarily) to the motherboard/system PSU.

If you decide to try that, be sure to set the hard drive jumper to the proper position...if it's not a SATA drive.

Louis

It has been plugged in for many start-ups so maybe that did something to it but when I plugged it into my second computer to make sure it was doing the same thing on both I still got the error.

I'll try taking it apart and putting it in my computer. I'm not sure what kind of hard drive is in there, honestly I'm not that knowledgeable with computers. I'm sure I'll be able to figure it out.

Thanks!

*edit*

Any tips for getting the MyBook Apart? Also, is there any good way to get the information off before I take it apart just in case something happens while I'm doing all this

(Thanks again)

Edited by genericsmith, 19 January 2009 - 01:04 PM.