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Lately I've had two separate 1tb external HDD's go from being recognized fine to showing as "local disk" and when I click asks if I want to format, or it says corrupt and unreadable. I've tried different USB ports and plugging them into my notebook and desktop and it's the same result.

Before they went totally screwy, I noticed they weren't scanning right when I tried scandisk (it would not complete) and Windows Explorer was occasionally showing messages saying a drive was corrupt and then I would plug back in and it would be fine so I did a chkdsk /f and I think this screwed them up worse.

These drives are pretty new, and they may have some errors but the data seems to be ok (I've ran TestDisk and I can see all my files, thankfully), but I don't know much else about the program and I'm kind of scared to mess around with the features there in fear of deleting the 2tb of data I got on them.

Is there anything I can do to try to fix the drives without having to buy a new 1tb drive and getdataback copy the files over and then format?

btw I can't put into my mobo because it wouldn't recognize because it doesn't support SATA, although I suppose I could buy a card to let me.

sorry for a long read, thanks.

Hi - Welcome to PCFH - we'll do our best to solve the problem.

Truly there can be no real advice until you acknowledge your critical data is secure.

I'd suggest find a friend/family with a SATA PC and sort it out, I'm assumming it's one of those external devices on which one HD mirrors the other.

Once the data is secure then we can look at the problems/causes - USB connectivity, software, etc, etc

Well the strange thing is that it's two independent HDD's in their own external enclosures.

One started showing messages it was corrupt around a week ago and the other just a few days ago.

I suspect my pci card that I'm plugging them into might have been giving them problems, it's really cheap, and maybe it's a problem with power overload or something because I have a lot of external HDD's going into my pc?

Then after I saw they were having trouble I ran chkdsk /f because I didn't know what else to try and this made it worse and now they won't even be recognized on my notebook where my usb's are fine on there.

Are there any things I can do that might fix the pc's ability to properly recognize the drives without threatening the data? I forgot to mention that this has happened before once and I used getdataback and it copied the data over fine, so I'm pretty confident the data is safe, but now I don't have a free TB to do this procedure.

I have to confess I don't have the answer that saves the data.

Others on the forum may know better.................

Hello there.

Do you need further help with this?

Please post back and let me know if it is resolved/fixed/answered or requires further help.

Thankyou.

JB.