hookups96 Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 Ok problem, wondering if anyone could help! I have a USB external hard drive that hasn’t worked in a while and I decided to plug in and mess around with again. It has lots of personal photos as well as other personal items I would love to have back. When I plug it in it shows up under My Computer, When I click on the drive I get the following message: L:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. I have tried a few things but nothing worked. Any ideas or tricks would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again guys! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xxmartinxx Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 What operating system are you using? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutchrudder Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 if files are corrupted the only thing you can do is reformat it, sadly this will delete everything on the HD Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeian Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 if files are corrupted the only thing you can do is reformat it, sadly this will delete everything on the HD you don't have to reformat. there's always professional recovery (expensive) and there are some software that can bypass that and recover files from the hard drive. you could probably even run chkdsk on it and maybe it would fix the directory structure if that is what the problem is. it doesn't necessarily mean that all files are corrupted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alphanumerica Posted April 22, 2009 Share Posted April 22, 2009 Don't Know if it will work but if it's windows: right click drive - click Properties - click tools - click Error check Worth a shot good luck Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hookups96 Posted April 22, 2009 Author Share Posted April 22, 2009 Thanks guys for your help. The drive can either be checked on Vista or XP Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hookups96 Posted April 23, 2009 Author Share Posted April 23, 2009 last bump and then i will leave it alone forever! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeian Posted April 23, 2009 Share Posted April 23, 2009 okay this was the first result from googling "data recovery software" but it looks like you can demo it to see which files you could recover and whatnot (that's the extent of the demo, if you want to recover the files you'd have to pay): http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-downloads.htm you'd probably need the ntfs one i think i may have had a similar problem to yours a few years back and i used some data recovery software to get everything back out.. i don't know if you should go w/ that program cuz there might be freer stuff out there, but i think if you use that you could at least see if it could read your hard drive and recover stuff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hookups96 Posted April 23, 2009 Author Share Posted April 23, 2009 Thanks i will look into that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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