[platti]

Hi. My Toshiba 500GB USB External hard Drive (with all my photo's from the last 6yrs holidays on) has locked. On turning it on it just flashed blue/red/blue/red etc. Doesn't make any clicking sound just flashes.

Its got a lot of personal banking details on also so I'm reluctant to send it away to be fixed.

I've searched the net to see if theres anything that I could try at home first to retrieve the data but had no joy.

Wondering if any of you good people could shine any light on it ?

Thanks.

[Hybr!d]

Does it show up in 'My Computer'

[platti]

No, nothing at all.

[Hybr!d]

You can check disk manger to make sure it hasn't simply lost it's assigned drive letter.

1. Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.
2. In the console tree, click Disk Management. The Disk Management window appears. Your disks and volumes appear in a graphical view and list view.

But to be honest it sounds like it has died, as drives are light and dust sensitive sending it to a clean 1000 lab is your only real hope, although expensive and no guarantee anything will be saved.

[platti]

Any idea what sort of price I'm looking at - roughly? ?

[Hybr!d]

I used to offer the service to my customers, all the quotes I ever got for them were £500+.

[platti]

Ouch. Ok, maybe I'll put the money into a better set up or a external online backup. Thanks for the comments and help.

[Hybr!d]

You're welcome.

[mctw]

could be that the hard drive itself is okay, thought unlikely. simply take it out of the case ( may be harder than it sounds!) and plug it directly into your pc (internally), if its already bust, you cant make it any worse can you.