hard drive corrupted

[stoogo]

I have got myself a new computer running vista home basic, I have connected my buffalo external hard drive and everything has worked ok. windows decided after a few days to "check the drive for consistensy" then tried to repair a problem with the "master file table" in the end i had to switch off as nothing happening. now if I skip the disk check and try to access my drive I get the message "E:\ is not accessable the disk structure is corrupted and unreadable" I have quite a lot of video footage taken at rally stages in the rain etc so dont really want to have gotten wet for nothing. could anyone advise if i can correct this problem or is it a dead loss.

 

Thank you muchness

[samuria]

There is probably water in the HD from the pictures(joke).

 

try a cmd prompt and then run

chkdsk f: /r /f

 

If it cant lock the disk It may ask if you want to check on startup. Do not open the drive with explorer or anything as it will lock it so it can do its job

 

 

This may take some time what does diskmanager say about it?

[stoogo]

Hi

disk manager says device is working properly, command prompt says cannot open volume for direct access. so i am now clueless. (well i say now!!)

 

Once i run chkdsk properly it says disk is corrupted and unreadable.

Edited August 11, 2009 by stoogo

[Tootech]

I think its a bit of a tricky one to diagnose.

 

Did you originally have the external drive plugged in to an older computer - eg Windows XP?

 

If so it's worth going back to that set up to see if Windows XP can read the drive and sort out any problems.

 

If the hard drive is beginning to fail the best way to deal with it is to remove it from its enclosure and plug it direct into a motherboard to run a data recovery.

 

It really depends on how far you want to go with it, what equipment you have, and how valuable your data is.

[stoogo]

Hello all,

Ive tried reconnecting the hard drive to the old pc which runs xp and the same thing happens. whilst racking my brains to try and sort it I remembered that before i shut my new computer down i had been setting up my i tunes which has its library on the external drive but that had worked ok, I had also tried to install my video editing suite (magix 10 edit pro) but after the install option screen would not progress in any way at all, I just presumed it wasn't compatible with vista and never gave it another thought . could that have anything to do with it?

 

Thanks peeps.

[samuria]

If you run the chkdsk option above and it cant gain full control it should ask if you want it to do it on startup as it can then test it.

Another option is fit it into a pc and boot from xp cd goto repair consul and enter the chkdsk into there as the disk wont be locked.

 

There is a lot of free ware that may test the drive for you