Fixing a damaged harddive

[Overread]

*I'm sure I've asked this before here and got an answer, but search is not being nice to me*

I've got an external harddrive, its spinning up and its activity light is blinking to show its got power, however Windows is convinced that it needs formatting. Now in the past there was a program inside windows that I used to correct the missing file system/menu/something I can't recall the name of - which thus restored access to the drive an its contents.

Has anyone a clue on how to fix this?

 

[pgriz]

Well, there's a "recover" command in the DOS command window, which you can fire up with the CMD.exe command from the Start menu.

 

[tirediron]

Have you got a Unix/Linux box that you could mount it on?

 

[ceejtank]

Is the registry bad?

 

[Overread]

Well, there's a "recover" command in the DOS command window, which you can fire up with the CMD.exe command from the Start menu.

hmm isn't that more about data recovery?

Have you got a Unix/Linux box that you could mount it on?

sadly I've only the single machine which is vista - I've honestly never used Unix/Linux

Is the registry bad?

it might be bad yes, the same drive did this one before and it was something like a bad registry or another similar name. The data is there its just lots its way to access it.

 

[Mully]

I would plug it into a different machine and see if you get the same problem ...It could be a communication problem but this will tell you

 

[Overread]

Scary fact - I just went into my computer to look for something else and the drive was showing up as normal!

Darn computer gremlins!

 

[TonysTouch]

Have you tried doing a CheckDisk?

 

[pgriz]

Well, I'd take that as a signal that you need to move everything you had on that drive to another. I use a set of 3TB drives for photos, videos, work stuff, etc. and one of my drives started to mis-behave, with read errors, and unreadable sectors. I copied all the stuff from that drive onto another similar drive and reformatted the one that was having glitches - so far it seems to be behaving, but it's now my third-level backup drive.