External not opening on a PC / Laptop.

[Aar12567]

So I was away for 2 weeks in Japan and when I got back, my PC was acting strange, so I decided to reinstall, while moving some bits to my External iomega drive, I think it got corrupted and now my external isn't loading on either of my PC's, or my friends laptop, the few times it has appeared though, it has asked if I want to format.
Which I would do if I didn't have important documents on there (stuff I've created, movies, pictures, work related stuff)

The odd thing is it works fine in the living room when I connect it to my LG TV via USB, viewing pictures and movies all work fine.
Please help me save my data.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Aar12567,

How is the drive recognized by Disk Management?(file system, partitions, etc)
You can check this out: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
Just keep in mind not to write anything on this drive in order not to overwrite the data that is on it.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[Aar12567]

The program on that page crashes whenever I click one of the icons, plus it looks dodgy.
Disk Management recognises it as (D It opens up with nothing inside, but opening on my TV shows all media files.

 

[D_Know_WD]

You can approach this in two ways:
1 - Try to recover the information some other data recovery tool.
2 - Try running error checking on the HDD. Keep in mind that if the issue is caused by bad sectors, the error checking process may "repair" these particular sectors and you will not be able to recover the data from them.

Windows Error Checking: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/check-your-hard-disk-for-errors

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[Stingerxxx]

One solution you can pursue is to use a file manager under a different operating system. Your TV has its' own operating system, most modern Smart TV's are built on a pretty basic operating system without a ton of bells and whistles like Windows is known to have. A open distribution of Linux may be able to view these files in the same way as your TV is able to, with the additional capability of copying these files over to any place you wish. There is no guarantee here, but I figured I'd mention it. There's a ton of distributions available, some of them contain data recovery methods of their own on top of the ability to browse files. My favorites are below.

Hirens Boot CD (Download link below the giant body of text, comes with a WinPE, DOS based methods and Linux based methods all in one.)

System Rescue CD Linux based, offers a Linux GUI and additional rescue/recovery programs