Cant read external hard drive!

[beatlejam]

Hello,

Here is my problem. I have a 250GB external HD (USB powered) that I have loads of stuff on and cannot read it on my PC and laptop. Is there not a program or summat that u can run to retrieve the info off.

What happened was, at a mate's and he was putting some stuff on it. Most of the stuff he tried to put on got on and some did not. The PC crashed and what have ya, and i took away my harddrive thinking I had everything anyway!! I tried to read it on my PC or laptop and no joy, it looks for it but cant find it. Light flashes etc it just doest get past the first second or so.

I want to be able to get the info off and then reformat it and start again from square one. On teh PC i can find it in explorer and can get thru to option to reformat it! Which i dont wanna do?

Now the reason I know all my mates stuff in on the harddrive is that my Playstaion 3 can read it and find the data!!

Any help or advise would be great?
Cheers

 

[lihuahellen]

Hello,

Here is my problem. I have a 250GB external HD (USB powered) that I have loads of stuff on and cannot read it on my PC and laptop. Is there not a program or summat that u can run to retrieve the info off.

What happened was, at a mate's and he was putting some stuff on it. Most of the stuff he tried to put on got on and some did not. The PC crashed and what have ya, and i took away my harddrive thinking I had everything anyway!! I tried to read it on my PC or laptop and no joy, it looks for it but cant find it. Light flashes etc it just doest get past the first second or so.

I want to be able to get the info off and then reformat it and start again from square one. On teh PC i can find it in explorer and can get thru to option to reformat it! Which i dont wanna do?

Now the reason I know all my mates stuff in on the harddrive is that my Playstaion 3 can read it and find the data!!

Any help or advise would be great?
Cheers

Your drive could be going bad or is damaged. Have you run a chkdsk on the external drive? Are you using a USB or firewire connection? Your cable could be bad. I would check the cable first by using a known good cable and then run a CHKDSK on the drive to see if it is going bad. If you get this message, "cyclic redundancy", it means that the file being read by your PC or software is corrupted. However, it does not mean all the data is lost forever. When data is transferred, it is usually in small blocks and each block is given a CRC value. If something goes wrong with the data between the time it leaves the source and arrives at its destination, the CRC sent at the source will no longer match the one that is calculated when the data arrives - this is when the cyclic redundancy check error will appear. The most common times you will see the cyclic redundancy check error message is when trying to read data from a damaged CD or DVD or hard drive. Also, If you have lots of zip files on your hard drive and want to check to make sure they are still valid, get a copy of CRC Checker - it's free and can validate zip or rar files in batches - which is much easier than doing it one at a time. This program is worth downloading and keeping on hand for when problems strike. Hope this helps.