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Hi there I was wondering if anyone could help me
I'm completely useless with computers but I recently bought my daughter a 1tb western digital ext hdd 1021 to use while she attended university. Last night we had a power cut and after the power came back on both of our laptops refused to show the hard drive. Her laptop uses Windows Vista and mine has Windows 7 and neither work.
It doesn't come up under my computer but it does come up in Safely Remove Hardware and Disk Management but under disc management it says the hard drive is on Disc 1, not initialised and unallocated. And then when I try to initialise the device it comes up with an I/O device error.
As I said I'm completely useless with computers and this hard drive has all of my daughters university work on, so I was wondering if anyone could help me.
Thank you
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Re: hard drive
by Kees_B 
- 5/23/12 8:17 AM
In Reply to: I/O Device error for my external hard drive by sbrady92
The only thing you can do yourself, in principle (but be sure to have it done by repair shop if you don't trust your own abilities): get the disc out of the enclosure and put it in another enclosure. It might work if it's not the disc or the electronics on the disc is damaged, but just the electronics in the enclosure.
If that doesn't help you find a good datarecovery company (like drivesavers.com or krollontrack.com) to recover your daughters data. That won't be free, but has a good chance to recover most of the contents.
Then the next thing to do: have your daugher run about BACKUP. That means: copying the data from the internal hard disk of her laptop to another device, like an external drive, once in a while (changed data every day, for example). And don't take that drive with you. Just leave it at a quiet place at home, disconnected, and hope it won't break down. External drives are unreliable and should only be used for two things:
1. Temporay storage of data that you've stored elsewhere so you can use it elsewhere.
2. Backup of data from a primary laptop or desktop, but only if handled carefully and preferably if there is another backup also.
For small scale backup (some documents a day, some pictures) use web based storage like Dropbox, Microsoft Skydfrive or Google storage (http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39567). But it's somewhat unpractical and expensive if you want to backup your downloaded movies.
Just copying critical data to a USB-stick (32 GB for USD 20) doesn't harm either.
There really is no need to lose any data nowadays, except a few hours of work since your last backup if your laptop suddenly breaks down totally.
Kees
thanks
by sbrady92 - 5/23/12 11:06 AM
In Reply to: Re: hard drive by Kees_B
Thank you I will take it to a repair shop tomorrow!
Total posts: 3 (Showing page 1 of 1)
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