Can't Access External Hard Drive

I am currently using Windows XP desktop and have a Seagate 250 GB external hard drive. I've been using it for the past few years, but it stopped working today. The problem is that even when the drive is plugged it, it does not show up in My Computer. I have gone to device manager, and when I plug in the drive, it shows up under disk drives, but it still does not show up under My Computer. I tried using it on a different computer, but the same error occured. Once time I used it the computer recognized it as a fixed drive, not an external hard drive, but even then I couldn't access anything on the disk. Is there anything i can do at this point?

 

Thanks for the info. One more thing: whenever I try to plug in my external drive to check it or run some diagnostics, the computer it's hooked up to becomes very slow, and some programs will not run until the drive is removed from the computer. Do you know of any way I can get around this, because it makes running the software to fix this fairly difficult.

 

Try going to disk management and see what it says about the external. Does it show a partition that is NTFS or FAT32 or does it think the partition is RAW (unformatted)?

Start>Run>type in diskmgmt.msc and hit enter button.

 

When I go to the Device Manager, it recognizes that the disk is plugged in. Initially when I go into disk management, it shows only my C and D drive, but after a bit a drive pops up with a partition, but there is no letter under the volume, and there is a blank under it's type of file system . It also says that the drive has a capacity of 232 GB, and that there is 232 GB free on the drive, but I still cannot access the drive. Disk management also says that the drive is healthy. I tried running FixIt, but that also did not help.

 

Hi,

I would try using Partition wizard to recover the partition.

Download and install the program.
Run it and it should show your HD and the external.
Click on the external in the lower pane where it says Disk 1 (or whatever # disk it is).
On the left menu should be Partition Recovery. Choose it.
Use the full disk option and the quick scan option.
It should come up with your old NTFS partition in a list.
Double click the partition in the list to see if it lists your files. If it lists your files then check all the boxes in the list(probably just the one box) and click finish.
Then hit Apply in the main window.
If there is no drive letter assigned to the partition after applying then right click the partition and choose Change letter and assign it a drive letter.
Windows should now see the partition.

If you have any questions please ask.

 

I ran the partition wizard, and it said that the drive was a bad disk. After scanning there was nothing under the file system or label, it had a starting LBA of 0 and ending LBA of 488397167, said the used size was 232 GB, size was 232 GB, and the status was lost/deleted. I tried double clicking on this, but nothing came up, so I didn't check the box and click finish. Should I have checked the box and hit finish?

 

Hmm,

I not sure where to go from here. I have never seen the bad disc message. What did that look like? Was it a separate window or when did you see it?

***
As far as choosing to recover it probably wouldn't do any good. The beginning and end numbers look OK but the size and free space is usually very accurate. Your size looks fine but unless you had the drive completely full you should see free space. That it doesn't see a filesystem is also a problem.

 

The error message was :

F:\ is not accessible
Error performing inpage operation

So at this point you think that recovery wouldn't end up helping regain my data right?

 

I'm not certain on that. I'm just not sure what you will get by recovering the partition if PW couldn't explore the partition to show you a file list.

I would say that if you want to recover as much as possible you should try Minitool's powerdatarecovery. It is the same company but just tries to find files and let you copy them to another drive. It won't try to fix the partition which may not be possible. If it can find the files at least you will be able to save them to your computer's HD. Then you can worry about fixing the external.

http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/ Make sure when you start the program you check the box that says you are a home user. If you don't check that box it will tell you have to upgrade to copy the files. You do not have to upgrade but must acknowledge you are a home user on the startup screen.

 

Alright thank you so much for all the help. At this point I think I'm just going to try and recover all the files that I can, and buy a new external hard drive. If you have any other suggestions for programs for file recovery I'd love to know them. Thanks again for the help!

 

From what I have read in threads PowerDataRecovery is the best free program out there. Almost everyone has success with it. The scan process is slow but it seems to eventually find the files.

If you can recover your most critical files then you can either experiment with Partition Wizard and see what happens with partition recovery or maybe try Easeus Partition Master and see what its partition recovery option will find. It is possible it may find the NTFS partition but show a different amount of used space (it might be worth a shot). If neither program helps you can just reformat the drive to NTFS and see how that works. It may have just been corruption and the drive will be good for a while longer.

 

So I ended up running the program, and I was able to recover all the files that I needed to get back, which was a huge relief. I'll try to run the other programs for the partition, and if it doesn't work I'll probably just buy another external hard drive. Thanks again for your help! I really appreciate it.

 

I'm glad you saved your files!

I think since the drive is a bit suspect that I would use partition wizard (or Disk Management in Windows) to delete all the existing partitions and Apply that change. Then create a new partition. In other words don't just reformat that partition but delete it-in hope of making a new partition table.

Then be sure to use Windows option to full format the drive rather than quick format.

 

I'll make sure to do that. Thanks again!