External Hard Drive Corrupted

gerbilpilchard

My external hard drive is showing up on the My Computer (XPsp2), however i cannot find anything in it, a little box comes up declaring that the hard drive files are "corrupted" or "unreadable". I have read on a forum that it's possible to retrieve files somehow. Does anyone have any pointers?

I have tried to plug it into my laptop, but the same problem.

I have tried to update drivers for the ex hd drv, (seagate), but they say they are ok.

please help

Lil306

Try running Recuva recovery program, it will be able to interrogate the disk better than Windows can

Avoriaz

gerbilpilchard wrote: »

My external hard drive is showing up on the My Computer (XPsp2),

I would suggest Recuva too. Good luck rescuing your data. I do hope you have it backed up if it is important.

Have you tried the disk in another computer?

Although it won't help the disk problem, you really should be on SP3. It is free and doesn't take long to download and install.

gerbilpilchard

have just tried Recuva but no joy, I have also tried it in two other computers but no winners.

fwor

I would guess that if Recuva can't find anything retrievable then the hard disk is probably in a bad way.

One thing you could try is chkdsk to see what it reports. If you look in My Computer and note the drive letter that it appears as (probably d), open a command prompt and type "chkdsk d: /f" (substitute the actual drive letter in place of d if it's different) you should see whether the Windows filesystem can make anything at all of it.

If it does find and fix problems, let us know, as some of the recovered files may be in an unexpected place.

Lil306

I'll try finding the program I used.

There was a recovery program I used that allowed me to recover files even from a formatted hard drive

Also because your hard disk is showing unreadable the boot sector may just need recovering, there is a program called TestDisk that you can use.