Harddrive problems

[Mowsuf]

So i have an external harddrive that had ALL of my music and pictures on it....and a couple of days ago it just stopped working. Tried rebooting, plugged it into every USB port I had...and nothing. But then it starts working...but it says all the folders are empty even though it shows 40+ gigs were still full....and i have no idea how to retrieve the info. Any ideas? Any help is welcome and appreciated

 

[LiLSandhu]

So i have an external harddrive that had ALL of my music and pictures on it....and a couple of days ago it just stopped working. Tried rebooting, plugged it into every USB port I had...and nothing. But then it starts working...but it says all the folders are empty even though it shows 40+ gigs were still full....and i have no idea how to retrieve the info. Any ideas? Any help is welcome and appreciated

take it to a computer shop or like future shop/best buy
they cud probably get the files back for you

 

[ban3rg]

this sort of thing happened to me before, but it was my C Drive that crashed. Windows was unable to recognize the C Drive, so i could not access any of my files (or start up my computer actually). i used Linux - a friend of mine burned a copy of Knoppix (a version of Linux that can be run purely from CD, don't have to install anything, the computer uses the OS which is on the CD) and Knoppix was able to recognize/access all files on all drives. I used it to move my files from the C drive to an external hard drive, to preserve all my files. -- So maybe try connecting ur hard drive to a computer that is running on linux???

 

[Saleem]

you can try running chkdsk on it if it might fix some bad sectors and making it usable

 

[Underground Gabroo]

most likely your master boot record has been damaged, and the hdd no longer knows what's what and where it is... you may be able to get your data back, however i would not trust this drive again for important information... if you know how to boot into dos (with a boot disk or what not) then you can run fixmbr (provided it's a fat/fat32 partition) and that usually will rebuild the drive structure... this worked wonders back in the days...

did your drive suffer any hard blows? does it make a clicking noise upon bootup or use?

 

[jasjeet]

try right clickong on the folders and it should say this onthe bottem atrributes change it to reald only if it on reradonly then i think ur files are hiddin that happen to me i just did somthing like coding on my command prompt

 

[Mowsuf]

thanks for all the advice guys. I actually took it to one of those data recovery places, and they charged me $1200 bucks to recover the data. I should be getting back the list of the files recovered by the end of the week...but yea, im not a happy camper, lol.

 

[terabaap]

$1200???
That is rape.

 

[Mowsuf]

it is indeed man...but they are offering a payment plan over 10 months..so its not as bad