HELP: External hard drive not working

[biggerry]

I use an external hard drive to store some personal stuff / family photo's etc.

I also use Windows Live OneCare to back up my PC. This morning I've noticed that the OneCare status was "Fair" so I opened it to see what I needed to do. It told me that it needed to back up my hard drive so I ran the back-up again. I then got a problem telling me that my E drive (this is the external hard drive) wasn't accessible so I went into Windows Explorer and tried to open the drive but I got a message saying "E:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable".

Is there anything I can do to access the drive?? Please say there is!!

 

[kellysayers]

same thing happened to me with a drive I got in PC world. Unfortunatly i have heard that they break very easily. Lucky enough I used it to store stuff from an old drive and had put it on to my new PC. It just stoped working one day and that was it. now I use remote storage to keep important photo's etc. I use eircom for storage and I got a external drive in the states that seems a lot more robust than the one I got here. Take the drive to a repair place you could be lucky!

 

[Technologist]

I use an external hard drive to store some personal stuff / family photo's etc.

I also use Windows Live OneCare to back up my PC. This morning I've noticed that the OneCare status was "Fair" so I opened it to see what I needed to do. It told me that it needed to back up my hard drive so I ran the back-up again. I then got a problem telling me that my E drive (this is the external hard drive) wasn't accessible so I went into Windows Explorer and tried to open the drive but I got a message saying "E:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable".

Is there anything I can do to access the drive?? Please say there is!!

Have you tried 'disc-check' on the volume? Assuming this is just a backup and you still have the originals on your computer, I'd suggest formatting the external drive. Maybe it got corrupted by being unplugged while it was still writing. A format will make it usable again. Then, for backup, don't use OneCare, just drag and drop the folders you want to backup on to the external drive. I didn't think anyone used 'OneCare', I thought it flopped some time ago? The name was a marketing disaster in the UK!