URGENT - help required

[Rhino172]

Cut a long stoy short..

slow running laptop
copied all pics etc off the internal hard drive onto Western Digital External drive

nothing wrong there, done a few months back everything has been fine.

Now, the western digital drive doesn't seem to get recognised?

Comes up in "my Computer" as Drive E; rather than what it used to say, something like WD600. Double click to open it and says dive must be formatted (which obviously i don't wanna do.)

However in device manager it does show as WD600 etc and it says the device is running properly.

Tried the drive in two other laptops and says the same thing on each.

Anything I can do? I really hope all the pictures aren't lost as there are litteral thousands of holidays/family/days out etc on there!

 

[biojo]

try the drive in another pc, only other thing is scan disk it and see if that could resolve it. tbh i wouldnt trust a single back up, All my images are on laptop , network drive , and uploaded to photobucket as a last resort.

 

[Longy]

It migh be the drive is loose from the casing - Windows is seeing the USB controller but not the drive. I've had this a few times.

unscrew the casing and make sure the drive is pushed in properly.

plan b - take it out of the casing and try either sticking it into a dekstop pc internally or try another casing.

 

[KDF]

I've had WD external drives go on me before..

As longy said, take it out the enclosure and direct connect it to your PC. if you still have problem try running various chkdsk utils

 

[Rhino172]

cheers guys, i can feel the drive spinning when it's conneted so I'm not sure it would be thats it come loose?

Alos some more info....the drive is and was first usd on my gf's laptop (it's her drive) which is Windows XP, wetook it to my laptop which is when he problem started and mine is Windows Vista...could i have been something to do with the different opeating systems? I'm not techy enough to know how to take it apart and I don't actually have a desktop to pull apart and put it in anyway...

 

[Rhino172]

more help please!

i've now plugged the drive back in my laptop (Vista) and on start up a "check disk for consistency" started....not sure what that was but i let it run...

now I can access the drive but it says there is nothing on it....but in the "computer" screen where it shows all available hard drives it says 30gb free of 55gb so it knows there is stuff on there but I can't get to it...any ideas?

 

[Rhino172]

the more i look into this the worse it seems to get...

tried running a dick clean up on the drive in question and it shows the 24gb worth of stuff but says it's all chdsk stuff....

i downloaded some chdsk recomvery tool but when i tell it to search the drive for chdsk files it says there arn't any?!?

EDIT: looks like it's cos they are system files or something. I've gone into the view options and they are now displayed and the software is annalysing them...fingers crossed!

 

[KDF]

Good luck recovering your files !

and an unfortunate typo in the 2nd sentance !! lol.

 

[adam1942]

have you tried a different cable mate? ive had alot of harddrives and printers become unregonized only for it to be the cable! 99p from tesco iirc

 

[Mike_182]

You'll want to use sector-level data recovery software, however it may be too late if Checkdisk has written stuff to it.

 

[Rhino172]

Good luck recovering your files !

and an unfortunate typo in the 2nd sentance !! lol.

pmsl good spot!

it's all good, it's going to take me a long time but i've unhidden the .chk files now. Now it's just a case of trying to open each one, i've got this picture editing programe that when i try to open a .chk file it says "this should be a .tif" or .jpg etc and it converts it back...

only 6000 files to go lol but it's definately working

 

[Rhino172]

wooo, for anyone thats interested i found some software thats now doing it all for me! get in..

http://www.ericphelps.com/uncheck/