I can not read my External HDD

adindas

Hi all

I have 250 GB external HDD. I tired to connect it to my laptop today, it is recognized but I can not open it. When I unplug it and connect it again, there is a message asked to be formatted. Of course I do not want to format it.

I have tried to connect it to my PC, same problem. My other HDD could still be easily read by my PC and Laptop.

IS there anyway how could I retrieve.restore my data ??

Thank you for your time.

paddyrg

What format is the disk in? It could be that the file allocation table is corrupted?

adindas

paddyrg wrote: »

What format is the disk in? It could be that the file allocation table is corrupted?

Thank you for reply.
I do not remember I have ever formatted it, It is Samsung HDD and I bought it two years ago
Sorry fir my ignorance. I an currently using Windows 7 now.

paddyrg

In that case, probably FAT32 format, which is widely compatible, but is old and not so rugged.

A recovery program like http://www.piriform.com/recuva may be needed here, but wait and see if there are other suggestions first.

And it may be worth getting a new drive if that one is unreliable now

fenlander_uk

I had a similar problem recently with a 1TB Buffalo drive which lost its partition table three times in two weeks. You will probably need to recover the data with a recovery program. I used Mini Tool Power Data Recovery, which recovered every file on the disk - over 600GB of media files. If you do use this, be sure to get version 6.5, not the latest 6.6 which has a 1GB limit on the free version (google for it).

You will need another drive, or sufficient space on your PC's internal drive, to copy the files to. Once this is done, you should format the damaged external drive with NTFS in Windows using the full format option, not the quick format. This will take 2-3 hours for a 250GB drive, but it forces a full surface scan of the drive and maps out any bad sectors. After that you can copy the data back from its temporary location. Don't erase the backup copies for at least a week, to be sure that the reformatted drive is working reliably.

Assuming the drive was fairly full, it will take a couple of hours to recover the data from your damaged drive, then 2-3 hours for the format, plus another couple of hours to restore the data from the recovery files.

Since I did this with my Buffalo drive it has worked flawlessly. And yes, you should get a backup drive and use a synchronisation program like Syncback to ensure that you have a backup copy of everything important. My two 1TB drives, which get hammered daily, are now sync'd to a 2TB Buffalo and the sense of security is well worth the cost of the drive.