*groan* External HD with a lot of important data went poot.

[Arudo]

Bleh. One of my primary external hard drives decided to crap out on me yesterday from some kind of
semaphore timeout issue, so a lot of my important school/work data is currently locked out or corrupted even... as well as a lot of my notes for coding/hacking games, mem-dumps, older gecko os and wiird codelists and other miscellaneous sentimentality things located on it...

My main PC couldn't read it for some reason... but my laptop had managed to open it (for a bit) to do a scan/repair, however stopped for some damn reason and now the drive is just being fairly... dead. Further attempts to connect to my laptop will detect it, but it demands that I reformat the whole thing before it can be used again.

It's kind of a pain especially when some of the notes/data on it are from years ago and I didn't get a chance to back up some of it since that hard disc didn't seem to be suffering from any issue, like clicking/etc.

Of course, this is the second external that has decided to crap out on me within the 3-month period, the first being the one I kept all my anime/movies on. T_T

[matt123337]

I had a problem similar to yours, brought it over to a friend to see if it was just my computer, but his windows PC didn't read any of it. Oddly enough, when we plugged it into his linux box, it mounted fine :S

[Patedj]

After formating you'll be able to retrieve your files. Well, most of them with a data recovery software.
I had a root virus a few years ago which stopped me from booting my computer. I then formated and ran windows xp recovery *something like that* and I was able to retrieve most of my things. Most importantly, my son's baby pictures! I'd say 50%+ recovered.

Good luck, get a refund!

[hawkeye2777]

If it's just complaining about a formatting problem, you may be able to recover the data at least. I'm not too familiar with the tools you can use to do it, but I'd say try downloading a Linux live CD (Ubuntu or Linux Mint should work fine), and see if the drive mounts on Linux. I've had that happen before too: Windows complains that a drive is corrupted, but it ends up working ok in Linux. You never know until you try... either way hope you can get your data recovered. Unfortunately for me, when my external hard drive died, I couldn't recover anything off it.

[Patedj]

Linux, is good I agree with you guys. I love linux Mint. I'm sure any linux will do the trick though, obviously.