Iomega 160 GB external HD not working; beeping when connected

[3Davideo]

I have an iomega 160 GB external hard drive I was using as a Time Machine volume on my Mac. I reformatted it to FAT so I could move files to my new Win7 Thinkpad at college. I got a new USB cord and plugged it in. It chirps/beeps, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes depending on if i move the drive. The computer does not recognize it; any help?

I'm worried that it may have been damaged when it went through the airport x-ray machine. I don't want to format it, since I'd have to travel 3000 miles to get my files back.

 

[Indigo]

I've passed these things through airport XRay scanners all the time, it usually isn't enough to damage it.

One thing you can do is when you connect it to your PC, click start, then RIGHT click on "Computer" and choose "manage" and then open Disk Management. See if the drive is showing up in there (it'll be easy to see because the drive will show the FAT file system as the format) and see if maybe the system is giving it a drive letter that the system already has assigned (this is pretty common on external drives actually)

Now one question I do have is did you format it as FAT or FAT32? It shouldn't matter for Windows, but it helps us to know what to expect.

I've had cases where this has occurred before - someone saved data to an external drive using a Mac, formatted the drive correctly, but the PC wouldn't read the data. It's likely still there, just not entirely FAT-formatted like the Mac intended. If that's the case, and the drive letter assignment isn't the reason, you might want to get some software like Catacombae - HFSExplorer (free!)

 

[3Davideo]

It doesn't show up at all in disk management. I took a look at the online manual and found out that the USB connection actually has to use a special cord that uses two ports - one for power and one for data; I was using a standard simple USB cord. It said beeping was a symptom of not getting enough power, so this should fix it. Store doesn't open until tomorrow though.

 

[Indigo]

That'll do it. I'll have to add that to my list of suggestions in the future, I don't normally run into folks using a non-original cord.