External Harddrive Problems

[kentoram]

So I've owned my USB iOmega Protege 1tb drive for about 6-7 months now. I have about 600gb on it full of travel pictures, movies...etc.

Just the other day, when I went to double click the drive to open the folders, It said error. So I unhooked it (the right way), and reattached it back to the computer, when it loaded up, it's asking to 'reformat' the drive.

This is something i DO NOT want to do, I cant afford to lose everything on this drive. I took the drive itself out, and attached it to my SATA and its STILL asking to reformat. I even tried it on 2 other computers.

I swear I wasnt doing anything to the drive at the time, I'm pretty familiar w/ computers and hardware, I built the machine im using myself. I run a web development company from home.

I also tried running it in /cmd dos, and its still showing errors. Its basically stating like its a new drive that needs to be reformatted. I also never did an update to my windows at all either. Like I said, this just happened out of the blue, for no reason.

Any ideas on how to get the drive recognized and working again??

Thanks!

 

[detox1]

a virus scan and maybe do a disk scan to check for errors

 

[kentoram]

dsk scan wouldnt work, gives errors cause the drive isnt there.

I know its still working, cause when I use a program called 'malwarebytes' and scan a full scan, it scans and shows the files in there. But detects NO problems. Yet, my system is STILL asking to reformat the drive. Any ideas how to remove this popup error?

 

[Indigo]

Drive is acting like it is hosed. Diversification is going to be your answer going forward - never ever ever store your digital eggs in one basket, especially on a magnetic storage medium such as a hard drive. Sadly, it takes an event like this to realize the value of multiple location storage (HDD, DVD, Bluray, etc)

That being said, get yourself a Linux distro (doesn't matter too much, as long as it's mainstream and supports disk recovery tools, I'm a big fan of Hirens Boot CD for their utility packed Linux distro) and then connect the drive after booting to that. You should be able to mount it and pull the data off of it that way, then re-format the drive or run a recovery tool to fix the boot records to regain access to the drive. Either way, you need to buy another drive, or find a way to back it up (permanently if possible, such as BluRay) so that you can avoid this in the future.