EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE TROUBLES

[Emil Gillberg]

I just had my CD ROM replaces by Best Buy. I re-connected all of the external devices, printer, sound system, mouse, key board, etc and all worked perfectly except for my USB External Hard Drive. It is an old Samsung model SV6003H USB 60GB External Hard Drive. The problem is that I keep getting the message that it is not formatted and do I want to format it now? I have lots of data, pictures and other important documents saved on it and will lose it all if I say yes, I want to format it now. My computer is hp Pavilion 753n, Win XP SP 1 & 2 with 768MB of RAM. Is there any way I can get access to it without formatting it again and losing all of my stuff that's on it? Thank you, Emil

[Ronald Postma · Accepted solution]

Hi Emil,
First thing I would try is to see if you can check the drive on another computer, if it works perfectly, you know your data is still their.

What was the reason the CD had to be replaced? Do not think it is relevant to your problem, but maybe it is.

Was the laptop reinstalled after the new drive? or is it the exact same installation that always worked fine?

One solution could be, is to remove the drive from devicemanagement and let it be detected again by the next reboot. You data will not be changed in any way, so it is safe to try.

To do this, rightclick on "My Computer" and choose "Manage"
Select "Devicemanagement" in the left pane.
Find you USB drive in the list in the right pane, rightclick it and choose "uninstall"
After this reboot.
If you have Win98 or so, it is a bit of a different story, you may need a driverdisk.

Hope this gets you started a bit,
Regards, Ronald

[Andrew Cowan]

Emil,

This is most likely being caused by a lack of power available to drive the USB connection. If your hard drive takes power from the USB because it has no separate supply, it is probably drawing too much, and could be putting undue strain on your power supply.

Potential solutions are:

1. Invest in an external powered hub (this is not guaranteed to work).

2. Purchase an external power supply for your disk drive. Extra cases are very cheap these days, therefore if there is no power adapter socket on your drive/case, consider buying another on that is powered and transfer your disk to it.

3. Some cases can accept external power and come with a keyboard power adapter, and this can spread the load for your laptop, and provide enough power to operate your drive.

[Vibhor Kumar Agarwal]

There are many cases that disks/floppies formatted with one version don't open with another.

With what version was that disk first formatted.

Can you try this with an 2000 system.
2000 i think is the best for such type of things.

[Emil Gillberg]

Ronald, I plugged the external hard drive into my Sony Laptop, Model K PCG-K35 and it worked fine. I then burned all of my data onto a CD. The CD workes fine on my hp desktop pavilion 753n which is the computer I have the external hard drive on. I then repluged the external drive back into my desktop and it still ask me to format the drive. I did, then copied all the data back onto it. The problem is now solved since I have the data backed up on a CD and again into the ext hard drive.

My grandson was playing a game on my computer, broke the door off and knocked the CD off it's hinges and gears. Lots of crunching noise.

Andrew and Vibhor, I never got to the point of trying your suggestions since I tried what Ronald suggested first and that solved my problem.

I do thank all of you that responded and will assign points. I was real worried because some of the data and stuff I had was not replaceable. My thanks to you experts, you have saved me a lot of grief on many occassions and you are very much appreciated. Emil

[Emil Gillberg]

Problem solved