external hard rive problems

[macneil]

Hi all I have a Astone 1 terabyte external hard rive my computer froze and i had to power it down from the power button so I couldn't unplug the hard rive with the safely remove hardware option. And now when i plug it in and turn it on it makes the usual noise usb makes and shows up in device manager and in the task bar under safely remove hardware but nothing happens when i click on it but it also does not show up in my computer I have tried on multiple computers with no luck anyone got any ideas on if its savable or not


Thanks Macneil

 

[Gandalf0444]

That is weird seeing as how most external hard drives will power on and off safely when you turn the computer on and off.
It could be that the board inside that converts the interface from USB or Firewire to SATA is fried. You could always take the drive out and hook it directly to the computer via SATA and see if it works then.
If it doesn't then you may want to run a disk check to see if the hard drive still functions and if the file system is still as it should be.
9 times out of 10 when a computer doesn't power down correctly the file system gets messed up and the hard drive won't work till it gets fixed.
To run a disk check in Win XP follow this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265
Vista:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Check-your-hard-disk-for-errors
Win 7:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/433-disk-check.html
Be warned though if it starts to recover and/or delete "orphaned files" you can lose some if not all the data that was on the drive. So it is a catch 22.

I would also suggest for future use:
Downloading this Hiren's Boot CD..
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
You download the ISO file and burn it to a CD. It contains a bunch of different tools to test your Ram, fix hard drive errors such as this without booting into windows, a good amount of anti-virus programs built in, and plenty of other goodies.

 

[macneil]

Thanks Gandalf I cant do a disk check because the drive doesn't show up in my computer I have tried using sata cable but get the same result as usb.

 

[clam1952]

Just in case, as well as using the sata cable take the power from the PC in case its the externals psu that's faulty.

If it's OK then you could just fit it internally in the PC.

 

[malikrthr]

I have the same problem with my HP simple save 1TB external hard drive. I shut down my laptop without removing the external hard drive safely about 1 or 2 times. Last week, when I plugged it in, it did not show up even though the blue light was blinking. I hope this does not stop it from working since the whole purpose of it was to back up trainz files.