Ok... I got this 250GB External Hardisk by Seagates which I had been using for 1 and 1/2 years.

I went for an oversea training trip for 3 weeks. I tried to use it today and this appeared:

There are a lot of important files which I had saved in it. Is there anyway to recover them if I reform the disk? If not what can I do to recover them? The disk is my backup should some shit go past my 2 Anti-virus, Bit-Defender 2007 and AVG...

Can someone recommand a free harddisk recover programme or some thing like that?


Thanks in advance!

 

Backups. I hope you have one.

Can you recover your data? If there is a hardware problem, then no. If it's a file system problem, then maybe.

When the drive is plugged in, put your hand on the case. If you can feel vibration from the spinning disk, and you don't hear weird clicking noises, then the data MIGHT be recoverable. I've retrieved data from screwed up file systems by using the excellent Paragon Hard Disk Manager. I've found older versions repeatedly offerred for free on magazine cover disks. That's where I got mine.

Actually, I've used Paragon to retrieve data from a hard drive that was having growing physical failures as well. You might be able to find a demo online somewhere.

If you format the drive, then your data will be lost. A program such as Paragon might be able to recover some of it afterwards, but you'd only be making things more difficult for it.

As an aside: you really shouldn't run two antivirus programs at once. They tend to interfere with one another and end up being worse than just having one good antivirus program.

edit: Paragon HDD Manager can handle NTFS file system errors. All of my drives are NTFS.

 

The disk is spinning and there are no sound other then the whirling of the disk... Thanks for the advice... Will try it now..

 

I Had a problem like this with one of my Externals on my old computer, I found out it was either my USB cable or the USB port on the computer. I would suggest trying a couple of different ports on your PC, better yet try it on a different PC.

If that doesn't work try a new USB cable, worked for me.

 

Seagate offers free Diagnostic testing software for all Seagate drives.

"Use the generic test when testing external drives."

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=3723b5b59b7d5110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

Not sure if that can help or not...