Here is the story this is just an Ebay special. 30 GIG hard drive el cheapo. Worked fine 2 days ago. Plugged it in today and get this message.
E: Not Accessable
Distructure is corrupted and unreadable.

Any thing I can do? Or is it FUBAR? I would like to get the files off. Some work files most just personal files like all the pics of my kids cars etc.
Rich

Is it the kind of drive where it's basically an enclosure, and you can take out the actual hard drive, or is it a single unit? There are a number of diagnostic and recovery utils out there you can run on a hard drive (here would be a good place to start), but most I know of only work with drives detected by the computer, ie IDE drives, not USB. I'm sure there's some windows apps out there that might do the job, but I haven't used any.

There's only so much you can do with a drive going bad. Once it hits a certain level of physical issues, it's generally not worth the expense. It might be just the USB cable going flaky, and not the drive itself. I'd check that first before going into more extensive methods. Is the drive making any out of the ordinary noises?

Try it on another PC.

It may be fixable, (or at least, you can get the data recovered )is it a regular sized drive?

Well 9 hours later. Ran the program getdataback that I found on the net. HOLY CRAP! 9 hours! went and did his thing and at the end it only said copy files you want to recover and it only had fat32 listed. Tried to click on it and it told me you can only do that with the registered version.
It is a removeable drive not a sealed unit. 30gig aluminum case you see tons on ebay of.
After running it though tried to open it and comes up same corrupt and unreadable. The drive shows up in my computer though.

Ill stop and get a new cable today. powers fine and seemed to run fine no noises and during the program getdata back the light went from green to red like it usually did when the files were transfering.


This blows. I know I had some of my kids movies there that I dont have anywhere else.

the usb drive is detected by the computer though so maybe one will work. Which do you reccomend?
Thanks all!
Still screwed.
Rich