Does anyone have any idea what I can do to fix this! Please!
I started having an issue last night while trying to access an external USB HD. The drive is a Western Digital - My passport essential 320GB formatted for NTFS. It was (is) about 2/3 full (around 100G left) mostly with photos.
Here's what happened, as well as I can remember:
1. I was on the computer, with the HD opened, when a box popped up in the lower right corner of the screen which said something like "USB Device not recognized" the open drive window then closed.
2. I immediately disconnected the drive and reconnected it. It opened fine, but was very slow accessing pages and opening thumbnails. The light on the drive was flashing a lot, almost like there was a program running or something.
3. I shut the computer down and restarted it with the drive disconnected (the computer would never boot with the drive connected)
once again, there was a lot of flashing so I left it go for about 20 minutes. When I opened the drive, it worked better, but one file gave an error like "disc in drive F is unformatted, would you like to format?" Knowing that formatting would erase all my data, I clicked "no". All other folders seemed to work ok. the properties for the "bad" folder showed 0 files, even though I didn't delete them.
4. I had some success repairing "lost" files before with chkdsk/f so I tried running that from the command prompt, but only on the folder that had the problem, not the whole drive. It came up with a lot of unreadable sectors and after 30 min, phase 1 was only 27% completed. Being impatient, I closed the command prompt and restarted the computer.
5. I then downloaded and ran the WD diagnostics from WD's site. I did a complete scan, which lasted only a few minutes, and found errors, which I clicked "repair".
6. Now, I can't access the drive at all!!! It comes up in "my computer" as "Local Drive F" instead of "My Passport F:" like it always used to. there is again a lot of flashing, but when I click on the drive, "My computer" is either "not responding" or I get and I/O error reading the drive.
Can I save the drive? and more importantly, can I save the data from it? Is it the drive at all, or is it a computer problem? Is there a utility I can uses to rescue it? Given what's on it, I'd rather not send it out to a shop. The drive does run, and doesn't make any strange noises.
Pleeeeeeeeese don tell me that my 200+ Gigs of photos are gone! This is the second time this has happened to me, (The first time was my stupidity and I'd rather not talk about it.
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