BloodSugar00
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2008
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I have had a 1TB Buffalo DriveStation external hard-drive for approximately the last 8 months or so that I've been using to store all my music, in both .FLAC and 320 Kbps mp3 file directories, amoungst other bits of media (some TV series video files, mainly). I had nowhere near filled it, perhaps unsurprisingly given it's capacity, but had at least 150 GB of data on there, maybe as much as double that- I hadn't gotten into the habit of checking how much of it's memory I had taken up and certainly hadn't checked it for quite some time so this is a very loose approximation-, never mind the time taken to meticulously rip, edit, organise, tag ,structure etc the albums and album info.
Understanding that a failure to such a drive could occur I had been meaning to aquire another one to serve as a backup source but, not having the capital to fund such a purchase straight off after I bought this one, although it was a future intention, it got both forgotten about and/or my money went elsewhere (on music and/or fresh audio gear, primarily). Long story short, classic case of irresponsibility and/or not thinking such will happen to you only to have it do so, or not, it looks as though I'm in a bit of a pickle here and wanted to seek advice!
Firstly, I'll explain the exact situation I'm currently faced with:
Where as, before, whenever you plugged the drive into my laptop or home computer via USB and it would be instantly recognised by either of those and you could instantly access it and open it via My Computer, now when you plug the drive in to primary computer source, in My Computer, only a generic drive F: is detected (usually it would be name of drive and a icon representing the physical appearance of the hard-drive). I double click this to try and open it and it doesn't open. Instead it stalls in the opening process for 30 seconds-a minute before bringing up a prompt that this drive is not formatted and that would you like to format it now? Sensing something was wrong- the drive comes pre-formatted-, I nevertheless thought I'd approach this and see what happened/if it gave me access to data on drive by doing it. Nope. It told me, to format hard-drive would mean any data on it would be lost, did I wish to proceed? Of course, I didn't and have thus come here to seek advice from more informed, experienced people with such hardware and perhaps getting round this problem without losing my data....
As to why this could of happened, my only speculation is that I did accidentally drop the hard-drive a few days ago off a work desk and onto a carpeted floor from a distance of about 2.5-3 feet. Happened by my forgetting hard-drive was connected to laptop and then going to pick laptop up off desk in a quite sharp motion as I was gettin up to move off with it. However, this didn't even occur to me as a cause for the above til just before as hard-drive continued to work for a few hours, at least, after that incident, no problem, plus, also, my laptop was having a few other problems around time external hard-drive ceased to be detected properly by it, enough that I resulted in resetting it a restore point, so I had initially presumed it was a fault with laptop and not external hard-drive. Also, it's so solidly constructed, externally, I wasn't thinking damage could of been done to the inside and outside the unit remained unblemished from fall.
Anyway, I was wonderin if any experienced folk could give me educated guesses on what they think is wrong with my external hard-drive? Could such a small, relatively cushioned drop have caused it to malfunction?
Would (re)formatting it, even if data is sacrificed, give me back access to hard-drive and restore it's functionaliy as a data storage device? If so, is there any way or method of formatting hard-drive without losing the data on it?
Thirdly, if the hard-drive is irrevocably damaged and/or formatting it to restore it functionality means I have to sacrifice the data on it, can anybody enlighten me to any means of hard-drive data extraction, who performs it, the cost, the procedure etc?
Any help with the above would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks in advance,
Steve
Understanding that a failure to such a drive could occur I had been meaning to aquire another one to serve as a backup source but, not having the capital to fund such a purchase straight off after I bought this one, although it was a future intention, it got both forgotten about and/or my money went elsewhere (on music and/or fresh audio gear, primarily). Long story short, classic case of irresponsibility and/or not thinking such will happen to you only to have it do so, or not, it looks as though I'm in a bit of a pickle here and wanted to seek advice!
Firstly, I'll explain the exact situation I'm currently faced with:
Where as, before, whenever you plugged the drive into my laptop or home computer via USB and it would be instantly recognised by either of those and you could instantly access it and open it via My Computer, now when you plug the drive in to primary computer source, in My Computer, only a generic drive F: is detected (usually it would be name of drive and a icon representing the physical appearance of the hard-drive). I double click this to try and open it and it doesn't open. Instead it stalls in the opening process for 30 seconds-a minute before bringing up a prompt that this drive is not formatted and that would you like to format it now? Sensing something was wrong- the drive comes pre-formatted-, I nevertheless thought I'd approach this and see what happened/if it gave me access to data on drive by doing it. Nope. It told me, to format hard-drive would mean any data on it would be lost, did I wish to proceed? Of course, I didn't and have thus come here to seek advice from more informed, experienced people with such hardware and perhaps getting round this problem without losing my data....
As to why this could of happened, my only speculation is that I did accidentally drop the hard-drive a few days ago off a work desk and onto a carpeted floor from a distance of about 2.5-3 feet. Happened by my forgetting hard-drive was connected to laptop and then going to pick laptop up off desk in a quite sharp motion as I was gettin up to move off with it. However, this didn't even occur to me as a cause for the above til just before as hard-drive continued to work for a few hours, at least, after that incident, no problem, plus, also, my laptop was having a few other problems around time external hard-drive ceased to be detected properly by it, enough that I resulted in resetting it a restore point, so I had initially presumed it was a fault with laptop and not external hard-drive. Also, it's so solidly constructed, externally, I wasn't thinking damage could of been done to the inside and outside the unit remained unblemished from fall.
Anyway, I was wonderin if any experienced folk could give me educated guesses on what they think is wrong with my external hard-drive? Could such a small, relatively cushioned drop have caused it to malfunction?
Would (re)formatting it, even if data is sacrificed, give me back access to hard-drive and restore it's functionaliy as a data storage device? If so, is there any way or method of formatting hard-drive without losing the data on it?
Thirdly, if the hard-drive is irrevocably damaged and/or formatting it to restore it functionality means I have to sacrifice the data on it, can anybody enlighten me to any means of hard-drive data extraction, who performs it, the cost, the procedure etc?
Any help with the above would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks in advance,
Steve