[barnsleyman]

Hi there, I wonder if anyone can help me?

I have recently bought an external hard drive Philips SPE303CC

At first it was working fine and I stored quite a lot of data on it. But recently my PC will not recognise it. I've tried everything but can get no result. I've tried it on a different pc also and it just isn't recognised.

I suspect it is broken it's still under warenty but the point is that I've got stuff on there I want. If it is broken would there be any way to retrieve what I have on there?

Or is it all lost?

Many thanks

[Mike0001]

As far as I know all these external drives use a standard laptop or desktop drive internally. It is simply a matter of connecting that drive directly to the ATA or PATA cables in a laptop
if it isn't corrupted. Have you tried a different drive inside the enclosure?

If it is corrupted then possibly the master boot record or partition table have been messed up. In this case, a live version of Linux may help you recover it. Another method is the Recovery Console which you can run directly from an XP CD.

There are commercial disk recovery programs you can buy for simple things, eg, Partition Magic, but see if you have someone nearby who already has it.