Problems with USB Hard Drive

Hi.
I'm having a problem with my USB hard drive.
It was working fine up until an hour ago, then it started giving error messages.

I shut down the PC safely and I restarted.
Now Windows XP won't give the USB hard drive a letter.
When it tries to detect it, its giving a weird letters as the kind of drive it is.
Its supposed to be a 200gb western digital.

I can't run a chkdsk on it because I can't get windows to assign a letter to the drive.

Is there any way to fix this problem without sticking the drive into a tower?
(I'm using a laptop here)

 

Can you assign it a letter in Disk Management, located in Control Panel?

 

What was the error you received?

Was it something like a Delay Write Failed error?

 

Yeah.
Before it stopped working right, I was downloading something using Bittorrent.
I was getting errors while it was downloading, and then I got a Delayed Write Failed error. It also said something about $mft or something like that.

And I can't get anything to show up in disk managment.

I've included a picture of what the "Safely Remove Hardware" is showing for the USB Hard drive.

I just want to try something before I have to take it to the repair shop and pay hundreds of dollars to get my files back.

 

Is device manager showing anything wacky?

Have you tried disconnecting all USB devices, then remove everything USB within device manager, then reboot? Then check device manager to make sure everything is ok, if not, have it automatically search for an updated driver...then plug any usb devices back in.....


Just a thought......

 

Tried that too.
Even tried using the usb drive on another computer.
Same stuff.

 

You should be able to run a chkdsk from recovery console. Thats what I would do. Don't be surprised if the drive comes up with unrecoverable errors--which can be hardware failure related.

 

Adrynalyne, a stupid question. Could it be a corrupt Master Boot Record (MBR)? If so, how does he fix it? Bazza

===

 

I'm not Adrynalyne, but, from the recovery console, you can use the fixmbr command to "fix" the Main boot record.......

 

Well "fix" is relevant I suppose. If its an MS software problem in the MBR, fixmbr will take care of it. If its from something else, like GoBack, Drive overlay, MBR virus, or a corrupt partition table, then Fixmbr won't work.