Usb Hard Drive Problem

[solent01]

May have a BIG problem here with this.

This morning I was on my computer reading the latest happenings in the world, also downloading to my USB hard drive, when we had a power cut, I don't have UPS backup so my system went down.

When I rebooted I found that I can no longer access the USB hard drive, it shows up in "My Computer" and "Disk Managment, within Admin. Tools" but I can not access the drive at all, I keep getting this error message "G:\ is not accessible Error performing inpage operation", which basically means it can't access the file structure.

I have tried to right click the drive within "My Computer" so as to run an error check via "properties" but again can't get access, I have also tried running a third party disc checker, but can't access the disc.

I have tried via command prompt and I still can't access the drive, yet I can run "chkdsk g:" with no other parameters, which I have done and found no faults. I am running "chkdsk g: /r" at the moment in a desperate attempt to regain access, but it seems to be hanging at stage 4 "Verifying File Data", I will leave this running whilst I go for a bite to eat, and a few beers, then when I get back I will see if it has gone any further.

I have connected the drive to a second desktop, with exactly the same results, so I know its the drive that is the problem.

The drive is a Lacie Big Disc 500Gb, and I am running XP home SP2.

The way I see it now is that if chkdsk dosn't work, I can try to access the drive with Linux, if the fails the only option (at an expence) is to send the drive to a data recovery lab...... ouch.

And no, I didn't back the drive up, well not completely true, half is half isn't, the half that isn't I was slowly burning to DVD's but didn't get around to all my photos and MP3's, both of these folders and sub-folders making up around 200Gb.

Anybody have any ideas of other options??????

[solent01]

Well four hours later using "chkdsk g: /r" from the command promp, my Usb HDD is sorted, I've got access back with no loss of data

First thing tomorrow I'm going shopping for a UPS pack and a 750Gb internal HDD, so I can just use the USB as a data backup and keep it unplugged when not needed. Now I am busy burning all my photo's and MP3's to hard copy.

Regards

A very relieved Solent01

Edited April 23, 2008 by solent01

[Cuban]

Sorry to hear - it happens - and a lesson for us all.

My worst incident was a old laptop IDE drive running low-level encryption protection that 'had issues' during a defrag, that data is very lost (mostly backed up) - I will try and recover the disc one day when I have the time to dedicate to it.