Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Please help with my external HP Hard drive not working

Mar 20, 2015 10:21PM PDT

Hi there i am hoping someone can help with my problem. External hard drive issue. I dropped it accidentally and it did work after that for a few hours but im suspecting the problems are because of that.
Its a HP Desktop HD BD07.
Drivers have been uninstalled and re-installed.
Shows up in devices under a different name than usual.
Shows up in disk management as 'Unknown' and 'Not Initialized'
If possible i would like a solution that doesn't involve wiping the whole drive. the files on there are important.
I also tried using a partition wizard but the drive would not show up.
Any help is appreciated thankyou.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
Re: drive
Mar 20, 2015 10:39PM PDT

There are 2 options, so it's quite simple:
1. It's only the electronics in the enclosure that are damaged. Then take the drive out and put it in another enclosure.
2. If #1 doesn't work, it's the drive itself that's damaged. Then contact a data recovery company like drivesavers.com or krollontrack.com and let them do what they are specialised in. Probably it will cost a 4-digit amount (in US dollars).

Let me ask: where is your backup? It's well known an external drive is a quite unreliable place to store your only copy of important files on. Of course, it's not a good idea to only use an internal disk also, so even then having one or two backup copies is necessary. But with an external disk it's even more necessary.
With 1 TB external disk being $60, backup on one device costs $0.06 per GB. That's rather cheap for quite a lot of important files.

Kees

- Collapse -
Answer
Just get another one...
Mar 21, 2015 4:20AM PDT

Too often its bad news. If you can get anything, then back it up, ASAP. There are no magic cures here for dropped ext. HDs. You can check the "storage forum" find the sticky and go from there.

tada ------Willy Happy