External hard drive corrupted or unreadable

[justinewilliams]

Hello,
I have been using an old laptop harddrive as an external hard drive for a while now with no porblems. However, all of a sudden the device is not being recognised by any computers (I have tried 3 others in total). I think it might be from when I downloaded a film to it but i can't even access it to delete the problem file or files. It has all my work on it and I cannot afford to loose any of it - help!

 

[Guest]

Fixed using PartitionRecovery

I had the same issue. External Drive coruppted - couldn't be read and asked for it to be formatted. Took it to a PC centre and they couldn't do anything. I ran some programs eg. Tooldisk, Un-erase etc. No results.

I eventually found a software program called 'Partition Recovery' in Canada. Cost $35. Ran it and restores everything. No damage to drive and working fine

Unbelievable especially after the PC repair suggested I send the disk to the manufacturer who will bust it apart to access the dick drive without any guarantee of a fix.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

 

[fzabkar]

Can you hear the drive trying to spin up? Any vibration? Did you drop it? Did you overvolt it with the wrong adapter?

Can you see the USB enclosure with Microsoft's UVCView utility?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

Could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine it.