External HDD recognised but cannot access?

[mattyk69]

Hi,

I have a 500GB Toshiba external hard drive which I use for movies, it is normally plugged into my 2nd machine in the bedroom but last night my laptop took a very long time to boot and was unresponsive, I eventually discovered that once I unplugged the hard drive and rebooted it was running fast as usual. I then plugged the hard drive into my primary machine but I cannot see or access it in my computer. The "safely remove device" option appears in the system tray and I can interact with that but nothing more. I also cannot see the hard drive in defraggler. As far as I know no major changes have happened recently and it is around 2 years old.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there mattyk69,

Most probably your HDD is failing.
Though, I guess you can try something simple as just connecting the drive with a different USB cable.
The drive is not recognized by both your computers right? You need to go to Disk Management and see whether and how is the drive recognized over there. Depending on that, you may need to use some data recovery tool: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
After that, you can test the drive and see what is wrong with it: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/282651-32-best-diagnostic-testing-utility

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[mattyk69]

Hi thanks for the reply. Using my main laptop I can sometimes get the hard drive to appear as simply E: and it appeared once in disk management and said that it was RAW data. I think I have to accept that the hard drive is dead if not close to. I do however need around 1GB of the files but Recuva said that most were unrecoverable. What should I do? Is there any hope?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Then I guess you can some some more software tools. There may be something wrong with the partitions.
Have you tested the drive? The results should eventually show that is wrong with it.

Check these threads out:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/280932-32-hard-drive-recovery
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/281425-32-recover-ntfs-partition

D_Know_WD

 

[mattyk69]

Hi sorry it has taken so long to respond. I have an update on the hard drive but I'm unsure what is happening to it. Around 50% of the time when I connect the hard drive it will open the hard drive folder as normal and show me the folders, trying to access any of the folders brings up a message saying it cannot be accessed due to a fatal drive error. When I try to view the drive in HD Tune Pro I can only access the Info and Error Scan tabs, trying to access any other tabs cause either the program or hard drive to crash. I did however manage to run a full error scan after around 30 minutes of trying and this was the result:

http://imgur.com/SvWrdVO


I have also contacted Toshiba who have told me that due to my location (UK) they are unable to assist in this matter or repair/replace the hard drive. Is there any hope of having it work again? Even with a reformat?

 

[D_Know_WD]

I assume that you have tried using a different USB cable.

You can try the Ubuntu Live CD approach: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode
Just boot up from a CD or external drive and see whether the problematic drive will get recognized.

Another thing you can try is to write zeros on the drive. There are some tools that can do that. This completely wipes the data and writes a 0 on every sector. After that, you can retest the drive.

Is the drive under warranty? In case it is, I guess you can contact the reseller.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD