[GENERIC]

Hello and thanks in advance for any advice,

I have a Western Digital dual combo media center 250 gig external hard drive that has been working great for the past 3 years or so.

Around Wednesday of last week, when I came home from work and tried to play a song from iTunes, it told me that it couldn't find the file (all my music is on my external HD, I thought it would be safer in case I had to reformat XP. go figure).

I opened up My Computer and the drive letter isn't there anymore. I've tried rolling the system restore point to earlier this month and re-installing the drivers that came with my external HD, and still no dice. I tired running a program called Tweak UI to see if the drive letter was uninitialized, but still no luck.

I noticed that before I went to bed the little yellow Automatic Update icon was in the system tray before that problems started. I'm thinking that it must of installed service pack 3 or something and that update threw everything for a loop.

I'm outta ideas here. Any help would be greatly appreciated as much of my work and music is on it. Thanks.

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Can't offer any help - but I've got a similar problem. I've got a 1TB USB 2.0 Western Digital external hard drive that I've been ripping my entire CD collection to (lots of time and effort involved). I've been ripping to my C:\ drive, and then transferring blocks of files to the external drive when I come close to running out of room on the internal drive.

Last weekend, I kept getting prompts that Windows wanted to restart in order to install an update. As I had dangerously little room left on my hard drive to accommodate the update, I clicked "restart later" and started to tranfer about 15gb of files to the external drive to free up internal drive space before going to bed, anticipating that I'd restart the computer to perform the update in the morning. When I awoke, I found the computer had frozen while trying to shut down. When I restarted, I found I had lost several drivers, amongst other issues. I also was only able to see the external drive ind Windows Explorer by it's letter designation only - but with no file information. In Disk Manager, I was initially able to see the drive, and I THINK it was listed as being in RAW format, instead of its originally formatted FAT32 single partition format. Same thing happened when I hooked up the drive to my office laptop. I could see it, but that was about it. After a few tries, I could no longer see the drive, either in Explorer or Disk Manager. I haven't been able to getting back to being able to see the drive. I've tried WD Lifeguard Diagnostics and GetDataBack with no luck. I still can't see a listing for the drive. I've tried directly plugging in to a wall receptacle, changing cables, etc, but nothing's changed.
I haven't tried Knoppix yet, which I've seen some recommendations for. I'm hoping somebody here can help me.
Thanks-
Walter

[WalterJK]

Can't offer any help - but I've got a similar problem. I've got a 1TB USB 2.0 Western Digital external hard drive that I've been ripping my entire CD collection to (lots of time and effort involved). I've been ripping to my C:\ drive, and then transferring blocks of files to the external drive when I come close to running out of room on the internal drive.

Last weekend, I kept getting prompts that Windows wanted to restart in order to install an update. As I had dangerously little room left on my hard drive to accommodate the update, I clicked "restart later" and started to tranfer about 15gb of files to the external drive to free up internal drive space before going to bed, anticipating that I'd restart the computer to perform the update in the morning. When I awoke, I found the computer had frozen while trying to shut down. When I restarted, I found I had lost several drivers, amongst other issues. I also was only able to see the external drive ind Windows Explorer by it's letter designation only - but with no file information. In Disk Manager, I was initially able to see the drive, and I THINK it was listed as being in RAW format, instead of its originally formatted FAT32 single partition format. Same thing happened when I hooked up the drive to my office laptop. I could see it, but that was about it. After a few tries, I could no longer see the drive, either in Explorer or Disk Manager. I haven't been able to getting back to being able to see the drive. I've tried WD Lifeguard Diagnostics and GetDataBack with no luck. I still can't see a listing for the drive. I've tried directly plugging in to a wall receptacle, changing cables, etc, but nothing's changed.
I haven't tried Knoppix yet, which I've seen some recommendations for. I'm hoping somebody here can help me.
Thanks-
Walter