External Hard Drive not working

delerium

Hi all,

I really hope someone can help me out with this.

I have a hitachi XL 1000 1TB external Hard drive. It was working absolutely fine until about a week ago.

It still boots up, it lights up and vibrates as if it's doing something, however doesn't show as connected to the laptop when I connect it.

I did a bit of an internet search and it advised me to go to control panel and administrative tools then disc management...and it does appear to be there and state that it is healthy however it also states it has no media and there is no recognition of the memory size or location of the drive.

We bought this to replace a desktop pc which became so riddled with a virus we could no longer access windows which meant that we lost all our photo's dating right back to the bbirth of our daughter and now this hard drive contained everything for the past year.....so anyone who could help would be doing us a huge favour....

paddyrg

Hmmm - it sounds like it has 'lost' the partition - what happened around the time it died? Anything major?

delerium

Not entirely sure.....it had survived me dropping coffee on it but it worked following that.

other than the coffee incident I don't think anything else has happened and I didn't mention that earlier since it had worked since then....

thanks

closed

There are many similar threads if you do a search, first thing to try is another pc if you have one available, second thing to try is to take the disk out of the case and attach internally to a pc, possibly along with recovery utilities like Recuva (do a deep scan), and disk digger or getdataback.

Be careful with disk administrator, and under no circumstances format it until you have your data.

Important data should really be backed up at least twice on different media, unfortunately you have made the common mistake of relying on one copy only, it's better to leave the originals on the pc, and use external drives for backup, along with a copy on dvd

Failing all the above, you are probably looking at £100's for a data recovery service.

If you still have the original virus ridden disk available, you could try the utilities mentioned to try and recover the data, often a lot of data will survive a format, an OS reinstall, and viruses.

tomsolomon

delerium wrote: »

Not entirely sure.....it had survived me dropping coffee on it but it worked following that.

other than the coffee incident I don't think anything else has happened and I didn't mention that earlier since it had worked since then....

thanks

What were you thinking, using your external hard disk drive as a coaster???

Run Combofix, or consider plugging it into another computer and running an extended virus scan, before writing it off...
PS make sure you turn off autorun before plugging it in to something else......

delerium

Thanks for the help so far, I will try. I haven't got another computer other than this laptop since the desktop became virus ridden...the ehd was never connected to the desktop as it was it's demise which prompted buying the ehd!!

As for using it as a coaster....I just couldn't resist it was so flat while my sofa arm was curved!!

paddyrg

With the virusy pc, can you boot from a linux live DVD/CD (eg Mint, Ubuntu, they're very Windows-like and easy to guess your way around) and see if the exhternal drive will work on that? There will be threads here for how to do that, search. For "linux live mint" here or on the web.