TFARCHIVE FORUMS

I think I damaged my ext. HD. I tried to restart my computer a few days ago and it was taking forever so I pulled the power cord and made it restart.

It seems my computer was in the process of backing itself up to the external HD and when I stopped that the way I did it caused some files to not be copied right or something, I don't really know. The point is that now I can access nothing on it. The HD still reads as there and I can see the files but all I get are disk errors when I try to click on anything.

My problem is that I have a lot of files on this thing that I can't access and I really don't want to lose them. I know I could reformat the thing and it would work again but I really don't want to lose everything that is on my 2 TB HD.

Any solutions?

Hound wrote:The HD still reads as there and I can see the files but all I get are disk errors when I try to click on anything.

Have you tried copying any of it back to the main HD first before trying to open them?

Try getting a separate USB adapter and using that after having taken the drive out of the enclosure. Presumably this is a 3.5" drive? With a 2.5" drive you can usually get away with just USB and a USB 3.0 port without additional power, but 3.5" not.

For example this sort of thing --

http://www.ebuyer.com/509064-startech-c ... sb3s2sata3

Both USB type external enclosures I've had in the past have died, personally. A proper NAS solution is a better bet. (And I use 2.5" drives for daily backups. Best to not use the same drive connected for regular backups as is used to keep the only copy of something.)

Once you've got it connected via a known reliable piece of hardware, do a scan from within Windows and if that fails try something like Recuva. Don't write anything to it before that.