Ok, so I have an external 500gb HD that I use to put all my files onto, and every few months I do a clean install of windows, everything fine when I do it. Now today I did it, and before I installed I checked the HD and it was working fine, but now when I connect the HD to the PC, it says "cannot access disk is corrupted or damaged", something along those lines. So is there anyway to recover the files on the drive or is everything....lost?! Or am I doing something wrong? And this may seem like a stupid question but, since I can recover deleted stuff with the program, is there anyway to recover the data that was on my internal pc hard disk, before I did a clean install of vista?
Vista sometimes has problems accessing external drives. You might want to connect the external on a different computer and see if it reads. If it doesn't, do a scandisk (with the boxes to fix errors checked) this will fix any file corruption on the external and get it to work again. If you turned the hard drive off while it was reading/writing it will cause file corruption. Even if you can't fix the file corruption, as long as the drive isn't physically damaged you can recover almost all your data. Just a few minor file corruption will render the hard drive unreadable, but all the data is still there. You can use the free "testdisk" to run more indepth repairs that "scandisk" won't fix. If that fails, "testdisk" has an addon called "photorec" which can recover data from a corrupted hard drive. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/697001
If you pull the external drive out of it's shell and install it inside your pc, you might find that nothing is missing at all. Cheap external HDD enclosures do this all the time.
Oh jeez seems no matter what i try it just aint gonna give me no love ! After reading a crapload of threads on this type of prob I got testdisk you guys were talkin about to no avail .I Have the windows version so its the right one. And i unrared it double click the testdisk.exe and the dos window opens up gives an option to creATE a log file put cursor on create click enter says PLEASE WAIT for a sec the closes and does nothing? Am i doin somethin wrong it said it didnt have to be installed that the files were all self contained? Even more lost ED-D
