external harddrive problem

[Deleted]

Hello all,

My pc died last week, and I took the harddrive out and bought it a nice aluminium house. I then plugged it into our other pc to see if I could access my old stuff.

Yesterday I could, although it said some files were damaged. Today it says it cant open because things are damaged and unreadable.

my old harddrive (which is now an external harddrive) is split up in two parts: drive K and drive L. I can open drive L but I cant open drive K. drive K is the one where I got everything saved on. According to this pc I need to 'format' drive K but if I do so I ll lose ALL files on it. It did open yesterday though...

now what? how do I get onto that drive? :P I need my stuff.

Daniel

[khalpone]

Without more testing, I can't say for certain. However, the most likely culprit is your allocation table is bad. If it's just a software issue, there's a decent chance at recovering the drive with the right software. If it's a mechanical problem on the platter, then...well that's bad.

Now you need to ask yourself how badly you need the information. If you really really need it, look up a local data recovery store in your town. If they want to charge you to inspect it and give an estimate, find a different one. :P

[vesseblah]

Try google "ntfs file recovery" and test out all free programs you find. There was some really good and reputable one, but can't remember it's name right now.

Since you can access different partition on the same disc it's 99% certainly software problem and you can recover something out of it. The risk of losing more data doing that is minimal but it is there. If there's something irreplaceable just unplug the disc now and get professional data recovery. They charge about $1k-2k for normal IDE HDD's regardless of what was recovered or how.

[Deleted]

What O_o? they ask 1000 dollars to get stuff of my harddrive?

I ll see what my computer guy can do then :P

[vesseblah]

What O_o? they ask 1000 dollars to get stuff of my harddrive?

$1000 is cheap if you (or angry spouse) has 'accidentially' slammed external disc with a hammer, but it's expensive if it's just a virus that has messed up the directories. Most companies have just one flat rate, and it's cheapest on mainstream IDE HDD's.