its ~~~~ed lol

[thommo]

i got problems with my big external hd.

right story, was downloading off newsgroups puppy ran in the room caught the charging lead and off the table the laptop went, F**king hell.........

anyway picked lappy up seemed fine evereything works but i got a warning pop up, i looked and inspected the lappy all seemed well.

UNTIL, i tried to plug my exteranl hd in a few days later, it wont show up windows doesnt even acknowledge theres a hd plugged in.

now here the bit i dont understand.

all the usb ports work when i plug the mouse into them. all usb ports work when i plug a 2 gig usb pen drive in.

it wont work with, my big hd or when i plug my n95 into it (which i do to get photos off it to the pc)

whats up? what is up?.............stumped.


just to add the hd was untouched it was the lappy that went off the table the hd was under the table.

[Jaffa]

No idea why it does this but sometimes when I used to plug in some things (not all things) into usb they didnt work and sometimes they did. I ended up going to computer management and assigning a different drive letter to them (like K or M) and they work everytime now. May have nothing to do with your problem but worth a try maybe.

[thommo]

thing is i cant assign a new address to them as they dont show on the pc, kinda catch 22, if they showed once i could change them but they dont.

problem only happened since the lappy fell, worked everytime before then.


dont really want to have to use the tower again for all that stuff as ive got all my accounts set up on the lappy. was easy just to plug the hd into it and dl.

thinks its a driver issue that may have got tits up but im not sure, everything in hardware looks ok, no warnings ect....i dont want to reinstall windows again either if i can help it.

i,ll hang fire and see if anyone else has had the prob or knows how to fix it.

[biffo1]

hi thommo mate the prob might be on ya external cos its powered mate the others arent r they ? when u plug them into ur lapppy is it an enclosed or external by u , i mean with an icey box .

[smirnoff_rules]

lm sure an external drive uses usb2 , so it the power goes to the usb on the lappy it might go down to usb 1.1 .. just an idea , have u tried booting lappy with the drive plugged in ?

[thommo]

well the hd is external and yes it got its own power supply, but the n95 isnt powered thats just like the usb pen drive but that doesnt show up either and that was no where near when it happened it was upstairs lol.


thats what a bit weird about it.


and again it was all fine before the lappy hit the floor. never a problem in the past not once.


prob seems to be with large hd,s mind you the usb pen drive is 2 gig so i dunno. hence stumped.

[Jaffa]

May sound stupid but did you try to go back a few days with system restore. It really does help a lot of the time.

[thommo]

yep tried all the usual....still the same. think i may have to reload windows or just start to use the media pc until i can be arsed re-loading windows.

even went to windows site and upgraded from sp2 to sp3.

its deff a pc prob and not hd.

[thommo]

ummmmmmmmmmmmm grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, it may be a hd prob, just plugged another into the lappy a 250 gig one and it showed, the 500g seagate still wont, right so its corrupt obviously something went amiss when the lappy fell as the hd was plugged into it although the hd didnt fall, so it must have sent something or corrupted it,

so question how do you format a external hd when it wont even show in windows?

pissed off now it had shit loads on it.

[smirnoff_rules]

ld put on my ide cable as a second drive and u might be able to recover it m8

[westkill]

ummmmmmmmmmmmm grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, it may be a hd prob, just plugged another into the lappy a 250 gig one and it showed, the 500g seagate still wont, right so its corrupt obviously something went amiss when the lappy fell as the hd was plugged into it although the hd didnt fall, so it must have sent something or corrupted it,

so question how do you format a external hd when it wont even show in windows?

pissed off now it had shit loads on it.

has it stretched or broke the usb lead in some way

from the external drive to the lappy

just a shot in the dark if youve tryed another drive with a different lead :)

[thommo]

pulled it apart and its a sata hd, i,ll try it in a tower pc tomorrow its too late now.


looks like a format and fingers crossed time, hope i can recover it had shit loads on it.

[krazylegz]

did you try a different usb lead connected to it thommo?

[thommo]

yeah its knackered did a search on the net and its common with these, so its in bit and ive taken the hard drive and im going to stick it in a pc and see if i can rescue it or just format it, dont think its the hd but i do think its the crappy circuit board in the ext enclosure, i,ll know for sure when i plug in it the tower at some point.

[MysteryV]

You should be able to rescue the data using certain data recovery tools. They dont cost much...say ?20/?30 which is nothing compared to what you may lose. I've used salvage data before and worked like a treat...lost a few files but nothing major. I then suggest you download the utilities from the hdd manufacture and run a utility which wipes the hdd clean with 0 on every sector. This usually frees up bad sectors too..

[Danril]

Could it not be the cable connecting the hard drive to your PC? Any chance you could try connecting the external to a different PC? It would help tick off another box in the process of elimination.

[thommo]

its all been tried, its deff the seagate ext enclosure, theres stuff all over the net about these ext drives, its in bits and ive salvaged the hard drive to go in my pc.

im not too pissed as i have a spare external one i can use.