So I plug an external hard drive into my laptop and tranfer some files. After that's done, the power cord pops out of the wall socket, so the hard drive stops running.
I plug it back in, and click on my computer, and click on the icon for the drive. According to the column on the left, there is stuff on the drive (the "free space:" and "total size:" section). I double click on the my music folder... but it shows nothing. I close out of that.
After restarting the computer, the icon for the drive doesn't even appear in my computer.
At some point (I forget if it was before or after I restarted), a little error message bubble popped up from the taskbar saying something about how a write operation failed and data being lost.
Now, when I plug it in, it says "One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it. For assistance in solving this problem, click this message."
The hard drive is physically fine, AFAIK. It's still spinning.
I imagine that whatever read/write it was doing when it lost power will be FUBARed, but everything on the drive?? How can I recover this data?
I plug it back in, and click on my computer, and click on the icon for the drive. According to the column on the left, there is stuff on the drive (the "free space:" and "total size:" section). I double click on the my music folder... but it shows nothing. I close out of that.
After restarting the computer, the icon for the drive doesn't even appear in my computer.
At some point (I forget if it was before or after I restarted), a little error message bubble popped up from the taskbar saying something about how a write operation failed and data being lost.
Now, when I plug it in, it says "One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it. For assistance in solving this problem, click this message."
The hard drive is physically fine, AFAIK. It's still spinning.
I imagine that whatever read/write it was doing when it lost power will be FUBARed, but everything on the drive?? How can I recover this data?