I have a problem with my external Hardrive.My laptop crashed and after that my ext hardrive hasn't been working for me.It's been recognised by the laptop itself but when I click it to open it up it says I need to reformat my drive.I took it to an "P.C Technician"yesterday he just plugged it in told me nothing can be done with it as you can't read the properties of the hardrive.I've tried googling a few programs to see if I can extract the files from the damaged drive but the few I have found haven't worked.It's a USB powered Iomega 500gb hardrive.Any tips\ advice is greatly appreciated.
ok tom, i did some troubleshooting on an external recently. how bout first off you replace the usb cable used for the drive. it might work with just that. another neat trick to use is right click my computer, go to manage, then select the storage tab. it should list all the drives, hard and optical, after "population"- which i guess is a querying process.
i actually didnt see that the drive is recognized. you can probably scratch the new cable thing. anyhow, in manager for strage right click the drive (probably will be a 465 GB drive) and assign it a letter or path. if you solve it or run into problems still just post back and maybe something else will help.
apart from what'a already been said above & if it doesn't work in all likely hood the boot sector at the begining of the hdd has become corrupted,this doesn't mean data is gone,it's just the info on it required by windows to read the hdd is messed up so try photorec or getdataback as they will be your only other hope,lesson learned always have a backup & avoid keeping both drives on at the same time as much as poss
One other alternative that might apply is if you know someone with a desktop and some basic computer skills; often the drive can be removed from the case and connected as an internal drive. Even if there is a problem with the boot sector, this often allows recovery software to work better.
