I am having a problem with my hard drive. can anyone help???

Tryntotechit

I have a project that is on removable hard drive (formatted with FAT32, for special reasons) and now the project is all messed up. Its in a different language and kinda jumbled. Is there any disk utility that I can recover my project. Maybe to check the table of contents. What about chkdsk to fix the errors on the disk? Any help would be great. The problem is that the project is due NOW. Thanks

KGhaleon

Could you start with what's wrong with the hard drive?

Can you access the contents of the drive, did you accidentally reformat it...what?

JDMurray

What OS are you using to access the hard drive? If Windows, have you tries running a CHKDSK? Where do you see the "different language?" In a folder listing or only when you open a file? What was happening with the computer and the drive immediately before you noticed the drive was corrupted?

Tryntotechit

When I started the disk up and viewed it under my computer (Windows Vista), the table of contents were jumbled or in a different language per se. I tried to copy the items from the disk and move them to the desktop and I could not do this. So, I tried to use my other computer, windows xp, and I couldn't even see the drive under my computer. I went to disk management and the drive was there except it wasn't initialized and the entire disk was showing unallocated. I tried to initialize and I got an I/O error. I found online that if the disk gives this kind of error, the disk my be failing. So I cannot access my drive anymore through my computer at all. I think that my disk has officially failed.

JDMurray wrote:

If Windows, have you tries running a CHKDSK?

I thought of this, but I can't access the drive anymore. I was going to right-click the drive and go to tools. then click check disk for errors, but I can't get to this point.

JDMurray

The bizarre characters you saw in the directory listing is a common symptom of the File Allocation Table being corrupt. This is caused by errors when data is being written to disk. Usually, it means the drive was being bumped or moved while it was writing to disk, but it can also occurs when the drive is experiencing an electromechanical failure.

If the drive is no longer recognized by the disk controller when your boot your computer then the drive most likely dead. Other clues are odd sounds coming from the drive and the drive itself getting very hot after running for 10 minutes or so. The thing to do now is try the drive on one or two other computer as a slave drive. There is the possibility the controller is bad and the drive will not operate as a master, but will run just fine as a slave.

It is quite possible that when you tried to (re)initialize the disk the FAT table on it was destroyed. So even if the drive operates as a slave, you will need low-level file recovery software to locate and restore the files on the drive.

If all else fails, I would find a PC repair shop that has a hard disk repair tool like the Kesender II and let them have a go at fixing it.

Tryntotechit

Thanks. I was figuring that the drive was failing. I will have to do some investigating then.

loxleynew

You could always try like fdisk and try to fix the MBR. Works like 1 in 10 times lol.