Iomega external drive not being recognised

[BayAreaSteve]

Hello,

I have an external hard drive
, iomega i , and windows7 home
edition; I get a message that
the drive needs to be formatted,
and no longer do I see the iomega
name next to the drive icon.

The drive is 6 months old, worked
fine until now.

In the device manager I do see the iomega name next to the drive
icon.

Obviously I don't want to format the drive.

I am running testdisk , the free recovery data software from the command line and am able to get the files to transfer, but the naming is all off , and the transfer is very very slow.

Help ... lol

 

[WyomingKnott]

You are doing the right thing. Recovery is a slow process, and if the directories are corrupt it can't see file names. Be patient. Sounds like you got corruption.

After you recover all the data that can be recovered, you could either repartition, reformat, and re-use the drive, or toss it in your community's e-waste recycling bin. I prefer the latter; if the drive is having errors, why depend on it?

 

[FreeDataRecovery]

Testdisk is a great utility for what it does but for example if the drive has bad sectors then Testdisk will have problems. If you are not seeing your filenames are you sure you are using Testdisk and not it's sister app Photorec? Photorec does not recover filenames but Testdisk does.

In any case it's best to first run software diagnostics on the drive to determine the drive's status before selecting a recovery software application.

 

[BayAreaSteve]

Best answer selected by BayAreaSteve.