Windows crashed while transferring files from external hard drive and now the hard is corrupted and cannot even be picked up by computer

Question

I have a 2TB Toshiba 3.5" External HDD. I recently clean installed Windows 7 64 Bit and had previously backed-up all my data on my external hard drive. After I had completed the installation I set all my files to copy from my external hard drive to my computer. However, while the transfer was in progress Windows crashed (Blue Screen). After restarting the machine I found that when I tried to plug in the external hard drive i got some error saying that the hard drive was corrupted or something.

Please, any help would be much appreciated. Thanks. J

Answer 1

Its possible the external drive enclosure failed during the file copy, causing the OS to bsod, if you cannot read the drive in Ubuntu as suggested by JoshN, you may have to open the enclosure to remove the drive to attempt recovery of your data. This would be a last resort if your data is very important.

Down side, opening the enclosure will void any warranty you may have on the external drive.

How to use Ubuntu to possibly see the data http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/

.

Answer 2

Download a live cd from Ubuntu Boot off of that and you should be able to find the files by mounting the drive with Linux. Sorry for the non-specific answer, but if you leave comments with @joshN I might be able to help you a bit more.