External Hard Drive Cyclic Redundancy Error

Did you boot to the command prompt with your win 7 disk or did you run it from windows? If you ran it from within windows then boot to the command prompt and try CHKDSK before windows loads.

Hello,

Al's idea is great. If you can run chkdsk, add the /f switch to fix any bad sector errors.

When you are activeliy using a HDD, or manipulating files on it when you abruptly lose power, you may have corrupted the open file, or the file structure or partition of the HDD.

To evaluate the HDD health, go to DiskMgmt and in the lower graphical section, list what it says in the Drive Status box, and in the Volume Status box just to the right. This will be your external removable HDD, listed possibly Disk1, or Disk 2 or 3 depending on how many fixed disks are on your Win-7 computer. Normally it should say Disk ?2, Basic, size_in_MB, Online. If it's a problem with the Disk organization, list those findings for us.

Good day!

Thanks for all your replies. I tried John's suggestion but it didn't work. The drive is really inaccessible and sometimes it's giving me "drive invalid" error. I tried other methods but the only thing that worked was the SEA tools for windows from the manufacturer itself (I can't believe I haven't think of them in the first place). It took 16 hours for that application to fix my drive. Now it's working nicely. Thanks again everyone. Cheers!  

THANK YOU - THANK YOU - THANK YOU - T H A N K Y O U !!!!!

I was having the same problem. My boyfriend tripped over my hard drive cord and disconnected it from my laptop while I was transferring some files. I thought I had lost over 1TB of my life. This is the third time this has happened to me (when will I learn to backup my files, right?). Every online post that I have ever found has said that when in this situation, you are either SOL or stuck paying big bucks to get your data back. This time I found YOUR post and I tried Start -> Run -> chkdsk drive letter: /f and in minutes my problem was fixed. File after glorious file was repaired right before my eyes. You rock!

Hi Madeline,

Glad to help. Sometimes bad things happen repeatedly to good people. Another option to consider is Carbonite. It's a backup solution "in the cloud" (on their servers encrypted), which occurs real time. Then if you have a HDD failure or HDD corruption, you can just download your image and you are back in business. It costs about $59 per year, but as compared to losing a TB of one's valuable files, or paying out thousands of $ for a commercial data recovery service, it's worth it.

Leo Laporte (the tech guy on radio/TV) always says "if you don't back it up, you can't get it back! Very true. It's like a term insurance policy on a Trillion Bytes of data,but instead of getting paid for the loss, you get the data back! Worth looking into.

I've got the same problem as yours. Too identical actually. I just want to know if you got yours fixed, Coz im really freaking out right now. Thanks.