wasson05

Distinguished
Jan 23, 2007
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18,510
So, I'm having a problem currently with my 160gb Seagate external harddrive. Apparently I must have unplugged it at the wrong moment(I forgot to "safely remove hardware," though this isn't the first time. The drive was unaffected by the previous times i unplugged it.). Now everytime I plug it in to a usb slot, windows recognizes something is plugged in and proceeds to tell me that a usb device has malfunctioned.

First of all, is there a way to get windows to recognize it?

If not, are there any other ways of getting my files without having to go to a professional?

I've been looking through the net, and I'm exploring the possibility of opening up the enclosure and detaching the harddrive. From there I was thinking I could hook it up as a slave drive and hurry and copy my files over to my main harddrive. I am not sure if this is a viable option; for all I know the drive itself could be completely dead and all my efforts could be pointless. I'm hoping someone here can help me fix my problem; I would hate to lose all the files I was storing on this drive. Thanks.
 
Take the drive out and hook it up to another computer. If you can read, open the files, the hard disk is okay and the enclosure may be bad.
More often the enclosure goes bad before the hard disk in my experience.