[pitythisfool]

edit: i tried editing line breaks in again but it keeps writing in one solid block. really sorry! hey guys and girls, i'm having trouble with my hard drive and i think i've shot myself in the foot big time. i'm hoping there's a miracle save so i don't lose all my files. thanks to anyone who takes a moment to consider my problem. some specs: windows 7 home premium sp1 gateway laptop, amd processor iomega external 1tb hdd, usb connection so one day i must have unplugged the hard drive without going to the safely remove option, and the next time i went to copy files, the drive was messed up, either corrupted or file system error or similar. i used the windows disk utility to check the disk and repair sectors, which took about 6 hours and told me affected portions were moved to found folder. following this, it showed up that this folder is empty. when i clicked over the iomega drive in the computer view. on properties i could see 180gb was still being used so i went copy and paste from iomega f: to within itself. this took about four hours, at the end of which it said i need user access for system volume information and it can't be written. i am the only user account so i couldn't figure what was wrong. then i remembered to go to folder options and show hidden and windows protected folders. that's where i found found.000 and its copy. and within i found chkdsk001 and that's where all my folders of data were. so then what i did was copy that whole thing onto the internal laptop hdd, so that i could format and fix the broken stuff on the external. so i did a full format, which took overnight, and then i pasted back from the laptop to the external drive. only now did i realize that the audio on every single music and video file is messed up, like it has lost a lot of the information, every few seconds it drops out or stutters. so my plea is thus: can i repair the audio using any software or is the data lost? can i get the information back from the drive, bearing in mind i formatted and then pasted over a portion of it? or are these files cooked forever and i need to go download fresh copies? i have about 200 each of movies and albums stored but they are all useless with crappy audio. please give any suggestions or input. thanks again for considering my problem and any expertise offered.

 

[Rich-M]

First of all Windows 7 defaults where "removable drives are optimized for quick removal" so you should not have to do "safe removal" anyway so it sounds like the drive is simply messed up.
Have you tried copying a few of the files to your main hard drive and seeing if the audio is still "messed up"? If yes I don't see any way to repair the damage sorry to say.

 

[pitythisfool]

yes unfortunately it is. well if there are any magicians out there who can give me an idea how to solve this at minimum cost, please give any info. thanks rich and community. and the drive is very new, can they really break in four months i got this boxing day? g-d consumer products

 

[Rich-M]

I didn't mean that the hardware was shot, though it could be, just that what is on it is corrupted. One thing we often forget is the stability of an external drive is most dependent on a cheap crappy chipset that converts sata or ide to usb and that is what fails, not the internal drive most of the time. But with the majority of the drive makers saving themselves money by not including fans for ventilation and on off switches for protection.