Hey I recently bought an external hard drive in october and its now broken, i can't open the hard drive, my pc just crashes, i have tried it on other computers and it does the exact same thing so i was just wondering if anyone could tell me how to delete the files on the hard drive. Any help would be much appreciated.
Seems to be a reoccuring problems with enclosures. See if you can take the hard drive out of the enclosure. Should be a standard hard drive. Set the jumper to slave and plug it in to the middle "slave," connector on your computers internal hard drive cable, don't forget the power too. If the hard drive is functional you should be able to see it in my computer.
try right clicking it and going to properties > tools > format sounds like the hard drive is corrupt and you have lost the data. only other way is for some data recovery software.. that might help but i highly doubt it
Ok i've just tried to format it, it won't even let me do that it says "unable to format" so i don't know anymore i'll probably take it to my computer guy now.
Who makes the drive? If you go to the manufacturers website, you may be able to get a "low level format" program. These are tpyically boot disks, and allow you to format a drive that is unformatable (is that a word??) in Windows. If you can find the low level formatter, you should disconnect all other IDE devices, and only keep the drive in question attached. This way, you cant make the mistake of formatting the wrong drive. If this works, I would then look for a diagnostic program from the manufacturer and run some tests to verify the drive didnt take a dump. ~Rich
could even try formating it via windows setup disk.. this way if its a windows issue it will not have a problem formating. your computer guy is going to try in windows then say.. cant do it then sell you another drive
