External Hard Drive problem

Mike V

Lighten Up, Francis
2A Bourbon Hound OG
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Having an external hard drive problem. Was connected to a tv and working fine. Disconnected to add some files. Plugged into computer and copied files to it. No indication of any problem. Disconnected from computer and reconnected to TV. TV could not see it. Plugged it back into the computer and there was no drive letter assigned. Using disk management, I assigned Q:

Device manager sees it.
Disk management sees it.
Casper Explorer (back up program) sees it.
Windows explorer sees it.
However, any time I try to access it, the computer slows to a crawl, then eventually I get:

Q:/ is not accessable.
The request could not be performed because of an i/o device error.

Disk Management sees the drive and the Q drive letter. Says it is Healthy (Primary Partition) and that it is RAW.

Properties show 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free with a 0 bytes capacity. it is a 320gb Seagate drive. Also, that the device is working properly and that the best available drive is already installed.

When I used Casper to attempt to back it up (wasn't really going to, just wanted to see what would happen), it said Casper was unable to determine the format of the partitions(s) on this disk or the format is not supported. When I tried to run chkdsk, I got "The disk check could not be performed because Windows can't access the disk.

Now I am pretty fastidious about backing up my computer, but this drive just had movies, tv shows, etc so I didn't worry about it. I would like to at least try to get a list of what was on it but I cannot access it at all except to attempt a format. I get to a START button but do not want to do that yet, and honestly, I can't imagine trusting this drive for anything except using it to transfer data.

Anyone seen this before? Have any ideas? Have any secret squirrel software that can get past this?

Thanks

Mike
 
Sorry it took so long to respond, but it literally took 2 days to analyze the disk and it could find no partitions and had write errors at each cylinder. However, it did see the drive and I was able to get a list of what was on it, so for that, I thank you.

Also, I am expecting there is some type of physical damage because when attempted, windows could not even format the drive. I think I'll shoot it, so all is not lost! Thanks again.
 
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