WD Harddrive freezing Explorer

TheBazman

Hi

I have a couple of Western Digital external hard drives and never had any problems until now...one of them seems to be on the blink. My computer wont start when it is connected - it just sticks on a black screen. When I unplug it and start the computer and then plug it in it freezes explorer (Explorer just goes white and says "not responding"). Then I disconnect and everything is fine again. Funny thing is when I go to the icon to "Safely Remove Hardware" the drive is actually there. Is there anything I can do to rescue this as I have quite a few films on the drive ?

Cheers

Ponster

Sounds bad but I often find that a linux livecd will often detect and mount a dieing disk when Windows can't see it at all.

TheBazman

Ponster wrote: »

Sounds bad but I often find that a linux livecd will often detect and mount a dieing disk when Windows can't see it at all.

Cheers - unfortunately I've never heard of that and even looking it up I'm none the wiser really. Is it a piece of software that will allow you to boot your windows pc using linux?

Ponster

Yes.

Ubuntu liveCD allows you to play with the Linux OS without writing anything to your harddrive.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Download -- Burn CD -- Reboot -- Boot from cd drive -- choose livecd option

After a few minutes you'll have the OS loaded and it'll detect your harddrives though if the damage is physical (and bad) then it may not work but you'll only have lost 10 minutes of your time in finding out.

ethernet

TheBazman wrote: »

Cheers - unfortunately I've never heard of that and even looking it up I'm none the wiser really. Is it a piece of software that will allow you to boot your windows pc using linux?

Nope, the Linux OS runs entirely off the CD. Can be slow to boot as everything must be uncompressed on-the-fly. Any modern Linux distribution should "see" and mount your Windows partition, assuming there's any hope for it. Hopefully this will enable you to copy files off it. Best of luck.

TheBazman

Cheers guys

Unfortunately I'll have to wait until I'm at the relations who have broadband to download. Living in dial up land is no fun (altho my exchange is on a list to be enabled by the end of 2009....great...at least worst case scenario is that I only have to wait 10months to retrieve the info from the drive:eek:)

Thanks for your help

Ponster

6-10 week delay but you can get the cd posted to you for free...

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

TheBazman

Cheers _ I'll do that

kaimera

have you tried the hdd in a diff machine?

one of my wd externals used to act up a lot like that, not showing in explorer but is there to safely remove but all only on my home laptop.

plugged it into my work one and it was fine

ended up backing it all up to another drive and formatting.

TheBazman

kaimera wrote: »

have you tried the hdd in a diff machine?

one of my wd externals used to act up a lot like that, not showing in explorer but is there to safely remove but all only on my home laptop.

plugged it into my work one and it was fine

ended up backing it all up to another drive and formatting.

yeah I tried it on a laptop aswell but the same result

seamus

Stupid question, but have you tried using a different cable to connect it? If the cable is damaged, it's possible that Windows will see it, but communications are screwed up.