External Harddrive virus?

themucaro

Hey guys,

At a complete loss here. The sister's harddrive has gone belly up on her, she has most of the stuff backed up but has a lot of college notes on it that she needs off it. I was going to hand it into a techie shop here in Limerick but said I'd post here first and see what advice I could get (apologies if I'm in the wrong forum).

I'll just copy and paste what she wrote in her own words....

"The hard-drive...basically it's always been a bit dodgy, for the last year anyway. It overheats or something, if I use it for an hour or so it'll stop working and an error message comes up on the computer. Then it said one of the folders (TV series) was corrupted, and I couldn't even open the folder, and then one day it just wouldn't work on the computer, caused the computer to shut down and that blue error screen to come up, not just on my computer, tested it on another one. All I really want off it are my photos and my college stuff, I can get the music and films etc back in the future".

From what she was saying, as soon as she plugs it into a desktop or laptop, it causes the computer to crash. Is there anyway of retrieving any of the data on it or do you reckon it'll have to be formatted?

Any help at all is much appreciated!

Verres

Without wanting to sound like a smart-ass, data that hasn't been overwritten is ALWAYS retrieveable; it's just a matter of cost.

As long as there's nothing "personal" (e.g. photos of her in a bikini / bank account details) on the drive then I'd probably drop it into a PC repair place and ask them to see if they can do anything with it.

From the sounds of it, there's a serious problem with the drive / drive controlling software (more likely). I'm not a hardware guy, but my guess would be that to get anything off that drive you'd have to open it up and slave the actual disk off to another HD and read the data from there. Unless your sister knows what she's doing, she'd be better to hand it into a repair place.

If there is sensitive data on the drive, your best bet is to try to open it up and slave it off yourself - if it breaks, all you sister has lost is €100 external drive and some photos. At least she still has her dignity / bank balance. I wouldn't trust anyone who works in PC repair with anything sensitive / personal.

It doesn't sound like reformatting will be an option as every PC you connect it to (by the sounds of it) will just crash, hence you won't have time to reformat before the PC goes down.

Baraboo

The hard drive has been failing and giving error messages for the last year and she still didn't think that maybe she should replace it or at least back it up.

Trying hard not to be sarcastic here but I think she should pay a technician lots of money to try and recover this data.

themucaro

Cheers guys! She was heading away on holidays and I offered to sort it, didn't think it would be much work. I'll just drop it into a pc shop