External Hard Drive wont load and comp cant read it

neris

My external hard drive was working fine yesterday and last night on home office pc but this morning when i plugged it into one of the pcs in work office it opened up let me access files and spreadsheets and then after 20 minutes or so i couldnt access it or get at the files. The office pc wouldnt recognise the hardrive at all but the home pc shows up a Local Disk: G but keeps asking me to format. I dont want to format the drive as all my work folders and accounts are on it and im afraid they,ll be wiped if i do. Is it possible to get the data out of the drive or reconfigure it with out affecting the files on it. The light on it is flickering away and its making a noise when its plugged in. It use to show up on my home office pc as Verbatim:H in the drive as well but I cant see a H drive anywhere

yoyo

Could be hard disk failure, or file system corruption. you could try using something like Recuva or PhotoREC to recover onto another different device. Never recover onto the same drive.
If the file system is corrupted that should work without too much bother, if the drive has failed your looking at specialist data recovery if the files are important

Nick

oisin

Try running CHKDSK on it first before you do anything. Google it or have a look here:

https://windowsinstructed.com/run-chkdsk-windows/

You can do it through Windows or with an elevated command prompt, the above link shows how.

oisin

Try running CHKDSK on it first before you do anything. Google it or have a look here:

https://windowsinstructed.com/run-chkdsk-windows/

You can do it through Windows or with an elevated command prompt, the above link shows how.