corrupt external hard drive

a friend of mine is running a laptop PC, im more of a mac guy so im not sure how to fix his problem. His external hard drive is corrupt and he can't get into it to access his music and date files. Anyway to fix that? I did a search on the net but I think most of what I get involves the main hard drive.

I know he is running windows Xp but im not sure on any of the other specs. its a fast PC so im thinking pentium 4, with 1gig of ram. Its a Dell too if that matters.

Thanks for any help

 

dont really need the pc specs since its an external device.

what exactly do you mean by corrupt? - is the hard drive being picked up but he cant read from it or isnt it getting picked up at all?

 

The device does get picked up, just when he tries to get into it a pop up appears saying the hard drive is corrupt (exact message I can't remember, but it did say corrupt) So the PC see's the device, he just cant get into it.

 

Try taking the drive out of the enclosure and hook it directly to the ide cable in ya pc.

 

{blink, blink} What will that do? and by enclosure are you talking about removing the casing? cause this is an external hard drive, the casing is the only enclosure.

And as noted before, the connection doesn't seem to be the problem, the PC see's a hard drive, just when we try to click into it, then it gives us the pop up that says drive is corrupted.

 

Yes but the chipset in the case might be fudged. So try hooking the drive right up to the pc and see what happens. As long as the bios of the comp see it, then windows will too.

 

if it has a waranty you will loose it if you open it up

 

Ok thanks I'll give that a try.

Anything else though, im a little worried about telling the guy to open up his hard drive to fix the problem first. maybe we can work up to that with whatever else it might be

 

Its very possible the data is gone and corrupted, but the chipset may be also screwing up. If it was me I would open her up and hook it up to the pca and give it a whirl. If tyhe data is corrupted then thats what he gets for not clicking remove hardware button in the taskbar before disconencting it.

 

Will reformmating the drive fix the corruption issue? He says he has all the files on his ipod, he would just need to get it from the ipod too the computer again.

 

Most likely yes. If you dont care about the data the a low level format will do the job.

 

Thank you for all the help.