HP Personal Media Drive (HD 3000)

I've had this Person Media Drive for a few years. It has worked perfectly. I have a lot of downloads from iTunes and important documents saved to it. My regular notebook is in the shop right now so I have been using my old desktop until I get my notebook back. I was in the process of moving some downloads from my desktop over to my Media Drive when the computer froze. I had to power it off, and after that the Media Drive does not show up in My Computer. I've uninstalled it from Device Manager and let it reinstall, but each time it says it has malfunctioned, then it list it in Device Manager with a "!" sign and gives the message "no drivers are installed for this device." Is there a way to fix this? Can I still recover my files??

 

Your external media drive is corrupted. Anytime an internal/external drive is shutdown while in process of reading or writing it runs the risk of it getting corrupted.

Maybe both of your drives are corrupted PC and external. To fix it you need to do a scandisk (with the boxes to fix errors checked) or a chkdsk x: /f (x = drive letter of drive). This will almost always fix the problem. Try and do a scandisk or chkdsk on the external first and see if that fixes it. If scandisk/chkdsk check good, try to see if it works on another computer. If it does, then your PC harddrive might have some corrupted system files preventing it from reading the external.

Don't worry about your data on the external. As long as the drive is working physically it can be recovered. A few corrupted bits of data will make the entire drive unreadable. Worst case scenario you can use the free "photorec" to recover the data.

 

I don't think I can do a scandisk or chkdsk check on the media drive because it doesn't show up anywhere, and I'm unable to get into it. :\

 

Windows is right; it has malfunctioned. You can probably get your data back by removing the hard drive from it's external case & installing it inside the system or into another external case.

 

Thanks for the reply and help guys. Would this work well to get my storage onto my notebook? A friend pointed me to this.

http://www.vantecusa.com/front/product/view_detail/266

 

The vantec will work, I have the same model and has worked great for me.

 

Thanks. I'm ordering one now, and hopefully it'll be here next week.

 

Okay, I got the Vantex SATA/ IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter in today. Hooked it all up and the USB said it was ready to be used, installed correctly, but nothing comes up in My Computer at all. I checked the device in Device Manager and it says it's working fine. The only thing left that could be wrong is that the HD went out, correct?

 

If it shows up in device manager add a drive letter to it. That will get it to show up in my computer.

 

I went into Computer Management, clicked Storage, and then clicked Disk Management which is how I was told to go into and add/change drive letters, but it still doesn't show up there. All that's there is Local C and my DVD drive...