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General discussion

Unable to access data on external hardrive

by odin444 Jun 23, 2005 4:47AM PDT

Hi

I have recently purchased a Lacie 160gb 7200 external hardrive for data backup and light use. I am running windows XP with an AMD athlon 2100 processor, 512 RAM and both USB 1.0 and USB 2.0 installed (the hardrive has been connected to the USB 2.0 ports). My OS is windows Xp with sp2 installed. I reformatted the drive to NFTS before i even started to transfer any data over and over the last 3 weeks everything has been working brilliantly. When I went to use the hardrive the other day, it failed to go through the autoplay function and whenever I go into windows exporer instead of displaying "Lacie" it just shows "e drive", Everytime the hardrive icon is selected, I am only given the option to reformat my hardrive which I am very reluctant to do as I know the data is still on there and was hoping there would be some way of retrieving it. I do have most of the files backed up on DVD, but transferring all of these will be a hugely time consuming event.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

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Try this.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jun 23, 2005 5:10AM PDT

Power down and do not plug in the Lacie. Now boot up and plug it into another USB port to see if it will recognise it.

Try running chkdsk on the drive letter it was assigned.

-> Not working? Call Lacie's support since it sounds like an early failure or the USB cable is not for USB 2.0

Bob

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chkdsk

by odin444 Jun 27, 2005 6:25AM PDT

Thanks bob. Its retrieved most of the files although it cant read everything still. I should be able to restore the rest with the backups I made on DVD though.

Really appreciate the help you guys give out on CNET. It helps average computer users like me gain a lot of very useful knowledge.

Cheers

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