Cannot open my hard drive. Need help!

[Pizzaslice]

I'm having a bit of a problem with my hard drive. When I connect/disconnect it my laptop makes the connected/disconnected sounds. It appears on My Computer as Local Disk (H but no details such as the storage space and how much space is free, appears. I tried doing some stuff after searching on google. But, Disk Management, opens and shows nothing when the hard drive is connected. And when I open it and then connect the hard drive it just kinda lags. I could really use a method to fix it without losing any of the files on it! Thanks

 

[bailojustin]

Remove the hard drive from your laptop as it sounds like it may be a hardware connection issue and plug it into a extra PC you have around to access your files and save them, if you cant then you know its the harddrive and not the laptop. may be a lose connection, only way to find out is to bust her open. or use disk part to see the DRive and its Contents

 

[Shaun o]

When you say connect your hard drive, are you talking about the one internal to your laptop under the removable flap on the base of your laptop.

Or are you talking about connecting a USB drive with an external case.
If the latter, and depending on the drive enclosure, if the drive is of the 2.5" or 3.5" in size.
The often reason as to why the drive stops working and you cannot even access drive information such as used, or free space of the drive.

Can be down to on some external drives, that what we call the bridge board, it has failed inside the external drive enclosure.

Segate, WD units are often prone to this when the drives are about a year old or more.
What they mostly use in external drives is a standard Sata drive of 2.5", or 3.5" the bridge board is just an extra interface, circuit board that converts a Sata interface to a Usb one.

By removing the bridge board and connecting the Sata drive to any system that has free Sata ports the information can be read off the drive in question, or the drive may work. where it does not within the external drive enclosure it`s self anymore.

You can open most portable Usb drive enclosures to gain access to the Sata drive in the unit.
If the data stored on it is very important and to test to see if the bridge board of the external drive is the cause of the drive no longer reporting or functioning properly as it should.

If the case you can pick up a new drive enclosure. With a new bridge controler board for about £10 to £15 on Ebay. If the testing of connecting it straight to a sata port on a motherboard results in the drive reporting it`s free, and used space and the drive contents can also be accessed.

 

[bailojustin]

Command prompt as admin
chkdsk /f E: E being the drive you want to check. it could be c or d or e whichever you made it.
It will ask to check disk on bootup, I recommend doing so.