Hello,
I have an external 500GB USB HDD. The HDD is quite full, about 3GB free space. Mostly filled up with photos and several million php, html, js files (10 years of backup as a web developer).
The HDD is NTFS formatted.
Yesterday I was watching a movie from the HDD. Once finished I closed VLC player and Windows explorer and tried to eject the the drive. Unfortunately like it is with Windows, it once again told me the disk is in use. No other programs were open as I just restarted my system before watching the movie. I tried several times again same error and because I was in a hurry I just plugged the HDD out. (not the first time I've done that)
A few hours later I came back and plugged the HDD back in but it would no longer recognize the HDD. I hear how it starts spinning, the blue light on HDD case comes on, but then after about 20-30 seconds it stops spinning (light stays on).
Windows 8.1 does not recognize the HDD anymore. Not in My Computer, nor in Disk Management. I tried on my MacBook. Not showing up in Finder nor in DIsk Utility.
I restarted both systems several times, waited hours and nothing happened.
The HDD doesn't make any clicking noises, so it should not be a hardware failure. I plugged HDDs out before without properly ejecting, mostly because it would tell me that it's still in use when it fact all programs were shut down, and the worst that ever happened was that I had to run scandisk on it. But now since it doesn't even show up, I can't run scandisk.
What can I do?
I have an external 500GB USB HDD. The HDD is quite full, about 3GB free space. Mostly filled up with photos and several million php, html, js files (10 years of backup as a web developer).
The HDD is NTFS formatted.
Yesterday I was watching a movie from the HDD. Once finished I closed VLC player and Windows explorer and tried to eject the the drive. Unfortunately like it is with Windows, it once again told me the disk is in use. No other programs were open as I just restarted my system before watching the movie. I tried several times again same error and because I was in a hurry I just plugged the HDD out. (not the first time I've done that)
A few hours later I came back and plugged the HDD back in but it would no longer recognize the HDD. I hear how it starts spinning, the blue light on HDD case comes on, but then after about 20-30 seconds it stops spinning (light stays on).
Windows 8.1 does not recognize the HDD anymore. Not in My Computer, nor in Disk Management. I tried on my MacBook. Not showing up in Finder nor in DIsk Utility.
I restarted both systems several times, waited hours and nothing happened.
The HDD doesn't make any clicking noises, so it should not be a hardware failure. I plugged HDDs out before without properly ejecting, mostly because it would tell me that it's still in use when it fact all programs were shut down, and the worst that ever happened was that I had to run scandisk on it. But now since it doesn't even show up, I can't run scandisk.
What can I do?
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram