HI guys,

I have an issue with the external hard drive,,,,It is showing on the my computer but cant access it...It gives the message "drive I: is not accessable driver corrupt"
can you give me a soulution? Is the the hard disk corrupt, or have I lost all the data from there? Is it recoverable? Help me out please!!!

Hi badrythm, Welcome to D-A-L.

The first thing I would do is try it on another computer. If it works there then it's okay and the problem is in your computer. Post back with results of this test.

I have tried,,, but failed to open..it gives me the same result...as not accessible...im worried, lot of imp.data in there...

I have found in the past, if you mix operating systems, you can not open one in another.
try this, switch on computer, connect EXT h/drive. go to manage and disc management, see if h/drive is active, IE blue line across top, not black. that will tell you drive is ok.

I see lots of failed external hard drives: the problem is that they are so small that they are much more prone to damage from shock than if they were inside a laptop. In addition many external cases have inadequate ventilation and the drive is damaged by heat.

"Driver Corrupt" is an unusual message but from my experience I suspect it is caused by a hardware problem. That could be a problem with the USB interface card in the external case, or with the drive.

So first thing to do would be to open the case and try connecting the drive directly to a computer. Listen carefully - the drive may be totally dead (suggesting some kind of power issue) or may be making a series of clicking sounds, or other unusual noises. Either of these problems will most likely require the services of a data recovery clean room. That can be expensive - quotes of $2000 are not uncommon - but there are some good budget priced services around (still likely to be at least $600 though). I use and highly recommend Austin Data Recovery Hard Drive Recovery Hard Disk Data Recovery Service RAID Data Recovery: IT Data Recovery - when I last took a hard drive to them they had just recovered data from a drive which one of the big national data recovery firms had estimated at $2300 and then said they could not recover anything, Tom got it all back for $800!

If you can hear it spin up and it sounds normal you are looking at either a problem with bad sectors, or a corrupted file system. Both are recoverable without too much expense.

If Windows gives it a drive letter but can't see files, the file system is corrupt, or more likely has a bad sector where some key data should be. In this case the drive should be seen by Windows Disk Management (press Windows key+R together to get the Run box and type in diskmgmt.msc). Disk Manager may not see any partitions but don't worry about that. If Disk Manager sees the drive there are lots of data recovery utilities available, such as GetDataBack or RStudio, which use the readable parts of the file system, and then try to fill in the missing information.

Be careful though - repeatedly trying to read bad sectors can cause complete drive failure. So ideally you should use some error tolerant sector by sector drive copying utility to copy as much as you can before attempting to read the bad parts.

Paul, PC Guru, Austin TX

The first thing I usually do is boot up my live linux cd and see if it comes up. If it does and you can access it then the win drivers are your problem.

If no you're back to square one unless you want to debug in a linux term.

Also for large external hard drives make sure to EJECT every time not just pull out the usb. Just good practice and can save on data corruption.

Start with software then move to hardware debug.