[th3wolf]

OK so one of my Western Digital MyBook external hard drives has stopped working and I really cannot afford to lose the information on it. Theres about 400 gb's of files that I really need on it. It turns on and doesn't click while it turns on, it shows up in my computer but just shows up as a drive, not the way that it used to appear. When I try to open it, it gives me an error message, I've provided screens below:



http://i27.tinypic.com/a0flus.jpg

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Hi th3wolf & welcome to Geeks2Go!

If you have access to another PC (preferrably one running XP as it's often less troublesome than Vista) plug it into that and see if you can read it. If you can, it's your Vista that's the problem.

(Please don't put screenshots in your posts (attachments are ok though) as they increase the page's loading time, and some of our members may only have a 56k dial-up connection.

Edited by pip22, 27 February 2008 - 02:04 PM.

[pip22]

Hi th3wolf & welcome to Geeks2Go!

If you have access to another PC (preferrably one running XP as it's often less troublesome than Vista) plug it into that and see if you can read it. If you can, it's your Vista that's the problem.

(Please don't put screenshots in your posts (attachments are ok though) as they increase the page's loading time, and some of our members may only have a 56k dial-up connection.

Edited by pip22, 27 February 2008 - 02:04 PM.

[th3wolf]

ok thank you
i have other hard drives tho, if they DO work and its just this one that doesnt, does that mean its a problem with the hdd or could it still be vista?

[pip22]

if those other drives are external too, and they all work ok, then yes I would say that one drive that doesn't work is faulty or is failing. But try it on a different PC before coming to that conclusion -- computers are funny things and it's not unknown for a 'dead' drive to work on a different PC. If, however those other drives you refer to are internal ones and they all work ok, it's not such an easy call to make 'cos the the one that doesn't work is connected via USB (the internal ones aren't) so it could be a USB-related problem (though judging by your screenshot error I don't think that is the case here). I was just pointing out generally you must remember to bear in mind the different types of connections and ports that a PC uses -- sometimes it's not the device that's faulty, it's the port it's connected to. And we all know that Windows can often give you misleading error messages about the nature of the problem. Sometimes good old trial-and-error is the only way.

Edited by pip22, 27 February 2008 - 02:34 PM.

[th3wolf]

yea the one that is broken is an external drive

im reformatting my computer (hte internal drive) and ill check the external drive again after ive done that and get back to you
if it really IS the harddrive will there be anyway to recover the data?

[th3wolf]

ok i reformatted my computer and it still cant read the external harddrive
it says the volume is corrupt, just like it shows up top

how can i recover this information?

[th3wolf]

bump.