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General discussion

Cant see the contents of my external hdd on PC

Apr 12, 2011 3:44PM PDT

I had my USB to Sata external HDD hooked up to my PS3, when all of a sudden it stopped showing the contents on it. I checked to see if everything was fine on the PC and found out that the PC did not display the contents as well. The drive shows up on My Computer and Disk Management.It shows the correct amount of free space as well. Have tried most of the tricks in the book such as, attribute change from cmd prompt, registry fix, show windows files from folder options and data recovery softwares to no avail. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Re: Cant see the contents of my external hdd on PC
Apr 12, 2011 8:08PM PDT

Connect the drive to your PC and run the Windows Error Checker on it:

Open a My Computer window.
Right-click the external drive & choose 'Properties'.
Click the 'Tools' tab.
Click 'Check Now'.
Tick both check-boxes.
Click 'Start'.

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Re: can't see contents of external HDD
Apr 12, 2011 8:26PM PDT

First of all: registry fixes aren't in the book, I think. What book and what fixes?
What recovery software used.

- What does My Computer say about the properties?
- What do you see in Windows Explorer when selecting the drive letter in the left pane?
- What does dir command say about the contents?
- What does attrib command say about the contents?
- What does chkdsk command say about the contents.
- What does the recovery software tell you?

Telling what does NOT happen is less informative than telling what DOES happen.

Be careful with chkdsk. If you run it in repair mode it might delete all contents.

As we say: you only lose what you didn't backup. So you'll lose nothing that was important enough to backup. So all you risk is losing some unimportant data. That's not important. And maybe the disk won't even function correctly after repartitioning and reformatting it. Then all you lose is the money to buy a new one.

Kees