External Hard Drive Woes

[idyll]

my external hard drive was working fine last night when i was watching a movie that was on it but when there were about 10 minutes left to go it suddenly stopped.

now my hard drive does not appear under "my computer" any more in windows xp, nor does it appear in disk management.

when i connect it to my mac it tells me that the disk cannot be read and i have several options (initialize / eject / etc.)... it shows up in disk utility and tells me that it is unformatted.

i purchased drive genius and made a duplicate copy of the hard drive. whenever i try to open the .dmg file, it tells me that the image file failed to mount because there are no mountable file systems? what does that mean?

if i try to format it in disk utility i get a input/output error.

if i try to format it in drive genius nothing happens.

when i tried to scan it for hardware problems in drive genius all of the blocks that were scanned were bad blocks.


what are my options? is the .dmg image i made usable?

 

[mad jew]

Mate, I'm a bit lost. Tell us a little bit more about your system and hopefully someone will be able to help you.

 

[blodwyn]

I hate to say it, but it sounds like your hard disk had died, and the copy you tried to take is unusable. My best suggestion is to try it on another system if you can, and see what happens. There's an outside chance the disk is fine and the enclosure USB/FW interface has failed, in which case you could try the disk in another enclosure, but I think that's a long shot. Sounds like you have nothing to lose by trying it though.

On a general note, external hard disks need to be backed up as well as internal disks if they have content you don't want to lose

Good luck

 

[mad jew]

On a general note, external hard disks need to be backed up as well as internal disks if they have content you don't want to lose

Excellent point mate. They're even more vulnerable than internal drives if you move them between machines/locations.

 

[sushi]

my external hard drive was working fine last night when i was watching a movie that was on it but when there were about 10 minutes left to go it suddenly stopped.

When you say suddenly stopped, do you mean that the hard drive stopped moving (turning)? Or do you mean, that you got an error and could no longer watch the movie?

As for recovery software, since you have a PC, you can use SpinRite which is awesome at recovering and maintaining hard drives.