Happy new year to everybody.
I recently bought myself a portable USB hard drive.
My particular model is the TEAC HD-35PU 320 GB.
I bought it mainly to transfer 40 GB of anime from my
filled up system drive.
It worked fine for a week, i was really happy with it.
But today, i was transferring a tiny file for temporary
storage, and my PC hanged. To clarify, the system didn't malfunction because of the file, it just hanged for no reason, like Windows sometimes does.
I restarted the system, but now, when i try to access the drive, Windows writes says:
Drive F:\ is not accessible.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
I suppose the drive will be usable if i format it.
But is there a way to repair the drive, without losing my info?
If there is nothing i can do myself, will the people at support be able to repair my drive and maybe restore the info on it?
Thanks in advance.
There might appear a hardware failure, that would explain the lockup. You may try to run a Windows' disk check utility, at least you will see how serious the corruption is. In case that there will be bad sectors in the place of FAT or other system areas, you may have to clone the disk contents on a healthy one, I'd use a live Linux distro for that - it's hard to do in Windows or DOS.
most probably integrity of the filesystem was compromised when Windows hanged.
you could download any small livecd that includes the fsck.vfat utility, like DamnSmallLinux or GParted. you have a good chance of success, but I am not certain. have usage experience but sadly no actual knowledge of filesystems.
well, if that data is important, don't give up yet. learn some linux. and good luck :)
>>1
I had this happen to me once before on a USB drive. Windows couldn't even tell if the FS was dirty. And running checkdisk wouldn't set a dirty bit. Either livecd, or GetDataBack, which despite the ubern00b name, is quite good at recovery after this sort of thing. You'll need another drive with 40GB free on it somewhere.