Hard drive dying it's last death?

[kidfromkibbly]

I've a house party to play on Wednesday and my external hard drive is now displaying this when I try to open a file on it.



I first started noticing trouble about a week ago. When I loaded a track into Traktor, the first minute of it would load into the deck, and play, but the rest of the track would be missing. After re-starting the drive, everything was fine, but now I'm getting this info window about the door being open. I'm guessing the drive is about to fail, but I can still access the drive and see the files, just not open them.

I have a new drive bought, but this 'door open' issue is stopping me from even copying files to try and rescue my collection.

Any suggestions would be appreciated guys!

[Julio]

Why does the application "Recover My Files" trying to open/browse into the drive?
Remove this application, clean your registry (Ccleaner, etc) and try again.

[kidfromkibbly]

'Recover My Files' is just a data recovery program, I was trying to scan the drive at the time through the program, but the hard drive just threw this message up.

I've run CCleaner, to no avail.

The drive letter was changed a while ago after I mounted a virtual drive, could this be a source of the problem?

[BentoSan]

Defragment the drive to see if its got bad sectors, its likely that the heads that read the hard drive have smashed on the plates, this happens if the unit gets banged around while in use and will cause bad sectors that will show up in a defrag.

[kidfromkibbly]

Smashed doesn't sound good. Would this mean no hope of recovering data?

[Julio]

You must make sure you can first access the drive through Explorer/My Computer.
Perform a Defrag & Rebuild bad sectors.

There's always ways to recover the data... don't worry about it now...

There are also many trial software you can you to restore your drive to optimum performance.
Try them...

Unless you hear your drive go "click, click, click" you are OK.

[BentoSan]

Smashed doesn't sound good. Would this mean no hope of recovering data?

http://technicallyeasy.net/2008/09/r...h-bad-sectors/
Give this write up a go

[smallfry]

Hm. You should make sure that it's the disk that's bad and not the enclosure. Take the disk out and plug it in internally (to a desktop). You may just need a new enclosure.

By the way, when you're looking to buy external drives, I recommend buying the hard disk and the external enclosure separately. Most external disks only have a 1 year warranty, but hard drives by themselves come with a 3-5 year warranty.