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General discussion

Hard drive wont open.

Mar 4, 2011 8:48PM PST

I have a 1tb Hp harddrive and up until a few days ago it was working fine (after plugging it into my tv's USB), but now when I plug it into my netbook or laptop (both OS windows 7) it comes up with no volume info and tires to format it. Also when I look at it with the disk manager it comes up as raw data but will then give the volume info. When I plug it into my tv (that has a usb port) or into my netbook while running OS Ubuntu it opens up fine. I don't want to reformat it because it got alot of important files I don't have copies of. Eeek what do I do?

Discussion is locked

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Before you do ANYTHING
Mar 4, 2011 8:54PM PST

Make BACKUP COPIES.

You say that Ubuntu sees the disk properly and presumably you can access the files using Ubuntu.

Use that to make backups before doing anything else. If necessary get another eternal USB hard drive to copy those backups onto, but make those backups now.

If you don't then you risk losing them all.

I will let others here offer options about the problem.

Mark

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Great idea but...
Mar 4, 2011 8:57PM PST

The total space on both the laptop and netbook isn't even half of what i've used up on the external harddrive and i've got no spare external harddrive. So i guess i'd have to buy another tb hard drive.

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Well.
Mar 4, 2011 9:05PM PST

I won't press the issue because I doubt you need lectures right now, and that is not my intention. But you place a value of these files on that hard disk yourself by not having backups.

We see this all too often in these forums, where members have lost their files and are desperate to recover them. It is painful at times.

One thought I have, you seem to have a number of different systems. Are they networked at all? I mean is this Ubuntu netbook networked with the other two Win 7 systems? If so, you could copy the files to the Ubuntu netbook, then transfer them to the others.

If not, my advice would be to stop using this external drive at all, until you can obtain another drive to transfer them to using the Ubuntu system.

Good luck.

Mark