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Question

External HDD freezing

Jul 15, 2017 6:49PM PDT

Good Morning,
I am wondering if anyone can offer any suggestions how I may gain access to an early USB 2/3 HDD, that I haven't used for a couple of years - I am on an ASUS TP500L running win 8.1, 8 gig Ram and an I7 processor.

When I connect it to the computer it is acknowledged as a local disk but anything I try to do after that freezes the computer so I cannot access any files, I am pretty sure I have backed it up but I want to see if there is anything I may have missed.

I have to check out all possibilities before I give it to a computer engineer friend who will give it a slow format and lose everything that is on it.

Any thoughts?

TIA

Discussion is locked

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Answer
External hdd
Jul 15, 2017 6:56PM PDT

Boot up a copy of linux, live cd, and see what it has to say about the disk.

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Answer
Re: anything I try"
Jul 16, 2017 1:18AM PDT

Is that ony My Computer/File Explorer to have a look at the files, but also Windows Disk Management (to look at the partitions), Safe Removal (to remove it), chkdsk (to check the file system), Recuva (to try to recover files) and format (to re-initialise the file system)?

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Anything I try
Jul 16, 2017 3:25AM PDT

Thanks for your responce,

Yes I have been through most of those, even tried a 3rd party defrag without any luck,

Disk management - Blank - none of the other drives come up
Chkdsk - computer freezes
Defrag - computer freezes
Format - computer freezes
When I select the drive and don't try anything else the green bar goes along the bar gets to about 95 plus % then freezes up after about 30 minutes I get the following error message
E is not accessible - the parameter is incorrect.

I have to power down to remove the drive.

Thanks

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Re: disk
Jul 16, 2017 4:08AM PDT

Doesn't look good indeed, assume it's not the hardware or drivers of your PC, so it's the same on another PC. And it's doubtful if Linux is a solution, if it's something with the external drive.

All you can do now: put the disk in another enclosure to see which of the two you need to replace.

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Ext
Jul 16, 2017 5:26AM PDT

Take the disk to your friend and see if they can read it.

If they can then the problem is in your pc.

If they can't then the problem is in the cable/enclosure/disk.