I own a 100gb generic USB 2.0 External hard drive.
The thing worked fine for over a year. Usually when I plug it in, the green LED light on the front of it would light up green, flash red a couple times, and then would be recognized by my machine as H: External. Last night when I go to plug it in, the LED lights up green, and then gets stuck on an orange color between green and red, not being detected by my machine. After several moments, it is only recognized as H: Local Disk. Windows repeatedly tells me I need to format the disk in order to use it. It appears to be blank, but when I used Test Disk to analyze the drive, my files show up, but are not accessible because my computer will not detect them when I plug in the drive.
I’ve checked on the external in both Disk Management and Device Manager. Device Manager says it’s working fine, and Disk Management says the partition is healthy, but that it is unused and disk space is 100% available. I know this to be false since Testdisk has shown my files are still there.
Here are a few strange things:
-Anytime I do anything that requires my computer to access it, the LED returns to the orange color and several minutes go by before anything happens.
-With it plugged in, Disk Management takes several moments to display all my drives. Once it does, Disk Management shows that the disk is blank. 100% free space. (Note: With the external unplugged, Disk Management works right away.)
-Clicking on the drive in My Computer causes windows explorer to freeze up for several moments before giving me a message that the data cannot be accessed, and cites a cyclic redundancy check.
Now, I’ve tried all the simple steps. Rebooting, trying different USB ports, trying to use the external on a different machine, and nothing has worked. So, my files are there, but cannot be accessed. I’m wondering if there’s a way to transfer the files, which are still there but not easily accessible, over to my laptop’s drive C, and then re-format the external? Or, even better, is there a way to fix this bloody problem easily?
The thing worked fine for over a year. Usually when I plug it in, the green LED light on the front of it would light up green, flash red a couple times, and then would be recognized by my machine as H: External. Last night when I go to plug it in, the LED lights up green, and then gets stuck on an orange color between green and red, not being detected by my machine. After several moments, it is only recognized as H: Local Disk. Windows repeatedly tells me I need to format the disk in order to use it. It appears to be blank, but when I used Test Disk to analyze the drive, my files show up, but are not accessible because my computer will not detect them when I plug in the drive.
I’ve checked on the external in both Disk Management and Device Manager. Device Manager says it’s working fine, and Disk Management says the partition is healthy, but that it is unused and disk space is 100% available. I know this to be false since Testdisk has shown my files are still there.
Here are a few strange things:
-Anytime I do anything that requires my computer to access it, the LED returns to the orange color and several minutes go by before anything happens.
-With it plugged in, Disk Management takes several moments to display all my drives. Once it does, Disk Management shows that the disk is blank. 100% free space. (Note: With the external unplugged, Disk Management works right away.)
-Clicking on the drive in My Computer causes windows explorer to freeze up for several moments before giving me a message that the data cannot be accessed, and cites a cyclic redundancy check.
Now, I’ve tried all the simple steps. Rebooting, trying different USB ports, trying to use the external on a different machine, and nothing has worked. So, my files are there, but cannot be accessed. I’m wondering if there’s a way to transfer the files, which are still there but not easily accessible, over to my laptop’s drive C, and then re-format the external? Or, even better, is there a way to fix this bloody problem easily?