[Jothel]

OK i have a Western Digital My Book 500gb Essential USB 2.0 external hard drive:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digi...4161627&sr=8-1

And it was working fine until about an hour ago. I was listening to a song that was on it and it started to freeze every so often. I thought it may have been Windows media player, so i re opened that, still wasn't working. So i restarted my computer and the hard drive wasn't being read at all. The rebooting took a very long time - coincidentally it took a very long time to reboot when my Maxtor hard drive messed up. I restarted again, this time it was a lot quicker leading me to think that it was either working again or it wasn't being recognised at all. It was the latter, i tried it on my laptop and it didn't work on there. When it turn it on it makes a weird ticking sound - the computer registers it in that it says "External HDD found" "Device is installed and ready to use" and whatnot. Does anyone have any advice? Theres stuff on there that i REALLY do not want to use. And i know that i should've backed it up but well, i didn't.
Have i ANY hope?

Thanks,
Rich

[Wolfeymole]

Hi Jothel

Welcome to TCF

If you can access the drive then run a check disk command prompt by typing, if your external disk is say E
chkdsk e: /f
Come back to us with what it says.

[Jothel]

Hi - thanks for the welcome :)
I can't access it directly - it does not appear in My Computer but the computer does make the USB sound when I turn it on and then goes on to say that it has been installed. However I shall try connecting it then running the check disk just in case that works.

Ok something odd is happening, I've just reconnected it to this computer (it was connected to the laptop) and it's doing the Auto play scan thing (I'm so technical....) It did not do this before so this is promising....It started out very quickly but has slowed right down on M....if that means anything at all. I'm just letting it do it's thing right now, don't want to interfere.

Ok doing the scan now:
type of file system is fat32
cannot read boot sector

But I can now open it in My Computer but when i try to access files it freezes on me. This is what happened with my Maxtor a few months ago. The Maxtor gave me an I/O error, so im wondering whether this will as well.

[Wolfeymole]

Have you got some kind of operating system on this external drive Jothel?

[Jothel]

As far as I'm aware no. It's just a 'plug and play' one really, there was no software needed to install it, it was recognised immediately and then I was free to put what I needed onto it. It has worked perfectly up until today, then just suddenly during a song it decided to go weird. If its any relevance the file I was listening to began with the letter M and i noticed during the auto play that it really slowed down around there.

[Wolfeymole]

Have a read of this from the boys in Redmond.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247575

[Jothel]

Ok thanks, i'll give it a go and tell you how it goes.

[Wolfeymole]

Please do Jothel thank you.

[Jothel]

Oh good lord thank you so much for that link. I followed the link, ran dskprobe.exe, did what the guide said completely, re-ran chkdsk, it did its thing and yeah, the hard drive works perfectly now. However - would you recommend i buy another external hard drive, just in case this one dies and i can't get it back? if so what would you recommend?

[Wolfeymole]

However - would you recommend i buy another external hard drive

Well a spare drive is never lost but there seems to quite a trend these days to get external drives, it quite irritates me as it fairly simple to install an internal one.

Take your pick from the selection here Jothel, I'd stick with the WD at the top.

Ebuyer

Always make sure you format any new drives in NTFS though.

[Jothel]

Ok thanks i will do, I'm surprised at how much cheaper those internal drives are. Think i'll check out that WD one.
Thanks for all your help. :D

[Wolfeymole]

Well I look at this way regarding external drives, all manner of things can dropped on them, coffee spilt etc.

If you do decide on that or any internal drive and are unsure of how to fit it please ask.

Your more than welcome.

[phil1551]

Oh wow...I'm having almost the same exact problem as Jothel had. Symptoms are dead on the same but when i ran chkdsk e: /f i got the option "convert lost chains to files y/n?" i chose yes and it seemed to do something. I can now open my hard drive in explorer but there is only one folder there labeled "FOUND.000" with a load of files inside labled "FILExxxx.CHK"
Oh please someone help