How to Recover Data from your External Hard Drive

Do you get that sinking feeling when you connect your external USB drive and get an error that your drive needs to be formatted? Even worse the device is not detected at all. This problem is also very common with laptops as they are portable devices and tend to get knocked about quite a lot which is not good for the hard drives inside the unit.

There can be several causes to this problem and the last thing that you need to do is mess around with the drive as any mistakes could prove costly as you make it even harder to recover data from your external hard drive.

There are simple checks that you can do to verify what the problem may be.

• Does the drive actually spin up can you hear that the drive is turning, you can normally hear this if you put the drive close to your ear.
• Can you hear any clicking or beeping noises? if you can then switch off the drive as you have problems with the heads on the drive and this will require professional help.
• If you go into computer management does windows detect your drive? If it does detect but tells you that the data is raw then you will need assistance to recover the data.
• You can use an external caddy to mount your drive into then connect externally to another computer and see what gets detected, if lucky you may see your data this then tells you that the operating system is at fault.

There are many examples of how to repair or recover your data but be warned that you may loose all data if you do not know what you are doing,  just following some guide on a website and hoping for the best is not a good idea as all situations are not the same as being discussed on the website that you are on.

If  you need further help and you live in Brisbane, Australia. Please contact us or come into our store in Everton Park.