I just got an Asus G73 with Windows 7. I've been using my external hard drive (which I used for months, called "PQI" from Toshiba, I believe) before, and tried to use it to transfer some school documents over...
The first abnormal thing I remember is that in the middle of copying files from the old laptop to the external, it stopped abruptly, saying that a "file had disappeared and couldn't be loaded", or something like that. Before that error message, I had the external attached to my new laptop and it was working PERFECTLY.
At first, I tried to plug it into the old XP laptop, restarting and going through the methods... no luck. When I UNPLUGGED the USB, the drive letter briefly came up and then turned into a question mark before disappearing.
My new laptop now takes a long time to recognize it (and when it does, it doesn't show any details). If I try to access it or see its properties, I'm told (sometimes) that I need to reformat the hard disk to use it... but doesn't this erase all the contents inside?
The EASEUS recovery program was actually able to get access into the external when I tried "recover all lost files", but it seems to take a long time (estimated total over 14 hours?) and was only able to find some of the smaller ones when the photographs I really need badly are much bigger (and it only allowd 1 gigabyte free restoration anyhow)...
So thanks to EASEUS, I think the external itself hasn't physically failed, but something else is wrong. Would anybody be able to point me in the right direction? I would go to a data recovery company as a last resort, but I know it's extremely expensive and at the same time that my privacy may be violated... so I'm wary of that.
Thanks a lot in advance!

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