External USB drive crash

DeusExMachina · 02-11-2009, 10:45 AM

I just had an external USB HD drive crash on me. When I plug it in, the drive shows up as F drive but when I double click it, it says something like the drive hasn't been initialized and needs to be formatted. And if you right click it, it says 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free. I had about 60 gb on the 250 gb drive so I am guessing the file table has been corrupted somehow. I looked online and it seems like external usb 2.0 drives seems to crash like this pretty often, particularly when there is a large amount of data xfer going on. Whereas this almost never seems like a problem on IDE / SATA internal drives. Anyone know why?

*Akira* · 02-11-2009, 11:18 AM

try taking it out of the enclosure and plug it directly as an internal drive. if it wont work, the HDD is as good as a brick. If it works, get a new enclosure.

WiLLiSTER · 02-11-2009, 11:20 AM

I never had this issue until one day, my external usb connector decided it would kill off 5 of my 6 external drives. Cooooooooooooooool. I started getting the problems you are having and couldn't find a fix for it with both pc or mac so I just stacked the drives and called it a night. Maybe you'll have better luck.