I have a My Passport portable hard drive and it worked just fine when I first started using it. I have songs and movies that I downloaded stored on there. I have maybe 20 of them. I used it the other day and was transferring what I had stored on there to another external hard drive. It transferred just fine. Then all of a sudden it stopped.
I have looked and looked to see how I can resolve this issue, but nothing has worked. I can plug the hard drive into my computer, it does recognize it and I can see the files I have stored on there. But when I go to transfer it just locks up.
I have always used the Safely Remove and sometimes it won’t let me remove it and I have to manually shut down the computer and turn it back on.
When I connect to my computer, the message comes up asking to Fix and Scan and when I click that then click to scan for errors, it does nothing. When I first plug into my computer the light flashes and when I open my files it will flash but when I try to open what I want to see or start transferring, it stops flashing.
I have Windows Vista on all my computers, and it does the same thing on all of them. So something must be wrong with the hard drive. Sometimes I can start transferring the files and it will do just fine, but will stop in the middle of transferring.
Is there some other way to get this going without losing what I have on there>
I downloaded and ran it and ran a quick test and it came back with a message that the test failed. I tried the extended and it was going to take way too long, over 24 hours. When I unplugged My Passport it came up with a message that there were too many bad sectors. Is there anyway to fix these bad secrors.
I thought writing zeroes would wipe everything I have on there off. Will go read instructions again, if I misread I will try that. I want to hopefully save what I have there and get it all transferred to another hard drive. But if there is no way of getting this drive fixed then I will have to redownload what I have and that is what I am trying to avoid.
I don’t have a Linux, Windows Vista. If there is no fix for this and I have lost what I had on this drive, then I lost it all. I think I explained fully what is happening and tried different possible solutions suggested here and nothing has helped. Thanks for all the help but if anyone knows a solution please let me know.
You can download an ISO image from many of the Linux source websites (see below), and burn that to a CD.
That is your live-CD that Joe mentioned - just have it in your CD drive when you start up the machine and then press the appropriate buttons on your computer to access the CD drive as the start-up source (it’s usually one of the function buttons - it should display on your screen at start-up before Vista starts to boot). You may need to go into your BIOS around then and enable booting from CD, or at least change the order in which devices are checked and put the CD drive before the HDD.
This will start your system using Linux direct from the CD - nothing is written to the HD at all and you can use it for the testing described above. Most of the links below will talk you through doing it in whatever flavour you choose (Ubuntu is probably easiest - see the link below for a fairly detailed walkthrough with troubleshooting advice too).
By the way you are correct that if you have to try writing zeroes to the drive as per Hamlet’s suggestion it will wipe it of your data. It is designed though to try and make the drive functional again though.
