faulty HDD

A

altvic

New Member
I have a back-up external drive which has 130 mb of data on (sweex 160 gb) on a FAT32 while my computer runs XP. This morning I decided,for nor particular reason, to 'disk clean' where after what seemed an inordinately long time of doing nothing and 'freezing up' I pulled out the USB cable and rebooted. Now I can't access the drive - 'properties' say there is no data on the drive and no space available.

I'd appreciate any help.

Regards

altvic:confused:
 
try it in another computer, it's still probably the drive, but check to make sure it's not the connection anyways, start simple you know
 
no luck I'm afraid - comes up with the usual message: g drive not formatted do you wish to format? "No I don't it's full of my data!"
 
no luck I'm afraid - comes up with the usual message: g drive not formatted do you wish to format? "No I don't it's full of my data!"
 
well first you shouldn't pull out the usb, you should let it finish whatever it was doing, but it's kinda late for shoulda's. Sometimes doing defrag will mess your computer up, happens rarely but I suppose it could have happened with a disk cleanup, even less likely though. If the hard drive has an ide interface, you could try taking it out of its external case and plugging that directly into the computer, but I doubt that will help you out. If the data is absolutely crucial, there are places you can take a hard drive where they can usually get the data back off of it, but it's quite expensive, my guess would be upwards of $300. Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you.
 
If windows is saying the drive needs to be formatted it usually means that the FILE ALLOCATION TABLE, (FAT), has been corrupted or doesn't exist.
(Caused when you unplugged the USB cable).

NORTON's DISK-DOCTOR will retrieve deleted/formatted information.
(However this is an old (DOS) program).
 
Take the HDD out of the external case and plug it in inside the computer. Windows chkdisk will only work with internal HDDs. Ideally, Windows should detect and correct the problems on bootup. A similar thing happened to me and this fixed it. If this doesn't work, you will have to try a 3rd party data recovery program.
 
Thanks everyone, I'll take drive out of the case and fit into another computer at the weekend. I'll let you know the result.
 
How to FAT format in XP?

The computer is a shuttle x so not much room to play around with inside. As I managed to get the important data back from discs I'd saved I formatted the drive through XP, which I am told is useless if I ever take the drive to a 98 machine. Is it possible to format in FAT on an XP machine?

altvic
 
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