External hard drive problem

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Finny

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Bit long winded but here goes...

I have a freecom 80GB external USB powered hard drive. I know that there is apporx 50GB of data on there mainly photos as im a freelance photographer. I came to plug in the drive the other day and its sayig it is unallocated and that the drive needs to be formatted.

I can only see the drive by going to Manage Drive on the right click of My Computer.

I have spoke to a few data recovery places and they have said that it seems that the file structure is corrupt and so I was wondering if there is an easy fix for this that I can do or is it gonna be the £400 bill to have done at the recovery place.

Thanks in advance.
 
Without having the drive in front of me it would be impossible to say what is wrong with it - it might be that something as simple as "chkdsk" run on the drive would fix it. However, there is always the risk that by doing that you can make things worse if it fails and it needs to be recovered.

I suppose the question is how important is the data, if it is critical and worth the price then you may have to go for data recovery to get the highest chance of recovery. However, if it isn't critical something like chkdsk may be enough to fix the problem if it is quite basic.

Although this suggestion isn't much help in the present situation, it is always worth making backups of everything. It took a situation like that for me to get into the habit of it, and it has saved my skin a couple of times since.
 
yeah I had bought another external hard drive purely for backups but hadnt had the time to transfer it over. The data is all photos that I have taken which have been used in publications, competitions and everything. So I am tryin to weigh it up to see if it is worth it.
 
Sounds like the drive is dead.
Thats one reason why it's often good to have back-up's on DVD's.
It will however cost you £££ to get the data off, you need to decide if you really want to do that.

Bring back the old days of 35mil negs:D
 
Finny said:
Tried that, it asked me to format the drive. which I didnt do.
Click to expand...

Have you taken the drive out of the enclosure and tried to connect it to a pc ? Or did you just plug it in to a pc ?

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You need to eliminate the possibility that the enclosure may have a fault ... take the drive out and "hang" it out in your PC as Abarbarian mentioned.

Make sure the little jumper is positioned as a slave drive and you use the correct position one the IDE cable ... ask if you are unsure how to do this. There is no such thing as a silly question. :thumb:


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If im honest im totally new to this. As it is a 2.5" HDD which I believe is out of a laptop will this still have the switch to put it to a slave drive?
 
Finny said:
If im honest im totally new to this. As it is a 2.5" HDD which I believe is out of a laptop will this still have the switch to put it to a slave drive?
Click to expand...
There is nothing in the specifications that tell me you can't just "hang" it in your PC ... I also notice the drive has a 3year warranty.

You have nothing to loose in looking ... surprising how "cosmetics" can hide a Std device. ;)


:user:
 
yeah I have spoke with Freecom about the warranty, and I had to get written authorisation to break the warranty seal which I have now done.
 
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