External Hard drive problem

J

jem00

Geek Trainee
Hey guys,

The wierdest thing just happened to my external hard disk.
I was copying files from my laptop to my external then all of a sudden laptop sudddenly switched off... thats been happening quite a bit lately...i'll post a new thread... any way I turned my laptop back on and as many of you guessed the external wasn't working properly, i suspected this.
Anyway I booted into ubuntu to test if their was a problem with the external or windows and surprisingly the external showed up in ubuntu with no errors i could copy files freely across from the external to the laptop and back across.

So i thought it could have just been the windows home edition my laptop was shipped with. So i tried it on a Windows XP Professional Computer and the same thing happened... the external was recognised but if i clicked on it windows would give me a prompt saying Drive F: has not been formatted. Would you like to format now?... and since ai have a lot of valuable information on it i obviously clicked no.

Would their be any fix for this or recommendations?

Thanks alot,

Jem00
 
Hi Mate,

This is just abit of a stab in the dark but i think the way windows accesses data is different than linux, therefore if the part is corrupt that windows uses the HDD not work on windows but will on linux, my quickest fix for u would be back it up on the liniux machine format it again on the windows machines that put the data back onto if of the Linux one??? bit of a ball ache i know but its the safest way of doing it without risking data.

Hope this helps Dave :cool:
 
Hey thanks,

Thats what I was thinking... but the problem is my external is 500gb and i've used about half of it..so 250gb... and my laptop has only 40 gb and my other pc has only 40 as well...

Any Ideas?

Jem00
 
few ideas to try here try performing a disk cleanup and failing this a defrag, it just might be enough to knock it back into place. failing this you could try some recovery software such as hard drive mechenic.

post back!! Dave :cool:
 
Hey,

Thanks for the reply. Do you know of any defrag in ubuntu?
Since i will have to use it since windows isn't recognising it.
Thanks,

Jeremy
 
i would suggest a new HDD & create a .ISO image of the external HDD on the new HDD on Linux then format the drive as NTFS from Windoze,

then try copying the files from the .ISO image back to the HDD

BTW: i think you must a corrupt partition table on that HDD & Linux is much much better than Windoze which is why the HDD is recognised by *Ubuntu and not Windoze[ot]Windoze is crap IMHO[/ot]

personally i use Kubuntu (basically the same as Ubuntu but it uses KDE instead of Gnome)[ot]hardly any difference, just a prettier screen with KDE, which is easier for XP users to get used to[/ot]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top