External HDD: Failure?!?!!!?!

[Coldkilla]

All I did was unplug both of my external drives so I could better wire manage them and now one of the drives gives me this error when I'm trying to access my data:

E:\Downloads\FileName (Directory) is not accessible.

The File Directory is corrupted and unreadable.

Of the thousands of files I have on this drive, the folders all say "Empty" when I hover my mouse above it, and simply clicking on it gives me that error.. All programs tied to this drive no longer run too..

Did I lose 3 years of storage?! WHAT CAN I DO!?

 

[bgc99]

You might try File Scavenger

Quetek

I had a hard drive do something like that when I was playing a quicktime video clip and the program crashed. I think you can download a trial, but you will have to pay to recover the data.

There may be a way to repair the boot sector or partition table but I wasn't willing to experiment and lose the data myself. I was able to recover all my data so it might have been a simple fix if you knew what to do.

BGC

 

[Elixer]

I would use this program to recover files:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Works very well IMO, and is free.

For the drive itself, I would get this program:
http://hddguru.com/content/en/...re/2006.01.22-HDDScan/

and run some tess on the external unit.

And I guess you now know, that you need to keep backups of the data you really want.