External Hard Drive and Disk Check

[Antilogic]

I've got a challenge for you guys. I've been working on this problem for about a week and am not any closer to a resolution, and my attempts at googling the answer online are coming up dry.

I have an external hard drive that has been acting fine for about two-ish years, and last week I received a toolbar pop-up that said it had trouble writing to the $MFT. Predictably, I disconnect and reconnect the drive to see if the message goes away, and I cannot see the data on the disk in Windows Explorer. I have run several chkdsk commands, with both /f and /r commands, to try and fix the file table. At best, I was able to see the file name and access 5 out of the 6 folders on the disk. The 6th folder did not have any files within, but it still had space allotted on the disk.

Now, it won't show up as anything besides 'Local Disk', and I cannot access the drive. Clicking on the drive in Windows Explorer will tie up system resources for about a minute while it tries to make sense of the drive, but now it just says it's corrupt and unreadable. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get this working again? Or at least workable enough to transfer the data off before a reformat?

 

[Cutlass]

You could try installing it internally and see if it can be read that way. At least open up the case and make sure all the connections are properly tight.

 

[Antilogic]

You could try installing it internally and see if it can be read that way. At least open up the case and make sure all the connections are properly tight.

I'll check the connections when I get back home; I've only unplugged and plugged in one cable, I could have knocked something else loose and not noticed it.

I hope everything needed to connect it internally is already present, because my tiny apartment doesn't have an excess of cables lying around. It's a WD 1 TB drive, don't know if those are easy to open up or not.

 

[Cutlass]

The case will be easy to open. And the cables between the case and the hard drive itself you need to check.

 

[Antilogic]

Okay, I've finally had some more time to work on this. Some observations:

Apparently, a Vista laptop can see the drive and access the files, no problem. As far as I can tell, it's all intact. The old XP desktop doesn't work. Different USB ports on the XP system don't work, so it's not the port that's bad.

I'm trying a checkdisk w/ fixing file system errors on the Vista laptop to see if that fixes whatever this problem is. I've read that checkdisking in XP doesn't always work right, although I thought those bugs were worked out by SP2. Goes to show ya how much I know.



EDIT: Okay, that didn't solve the problem either, WD's diagnostic software says the drive is fine. I am at a loss. Everything is fine but XP. I'm thinking I might have to reassign the drive to a different letter or do some other kind of funny business with the device manager. Google is being notoriously unhelpful in returning relevant results here.

 

[Cutlass]

Does anything else work in those USB ports? Could it be a USB driver problem or hardware problem?

 

[Antilogic]

Does anything else work in those USB ports? Could it be a USB driver problem or hardware problem?

My jump drive seems to work fine in at least one of the alternate ports I've tried, I'll try some other stuff more systematically when I have the chance.