[apope8]

Hey Everyone,

I'm a first time poster here so if this post is in the wrong topic please feel free to move it.

I recently bought a new laptop a week ago (specs listed in profile) and i use an external harddrive to store all my photos, music, movies, etc. This harddrive worked fine all week, but then today when i plugged it in it was completly empty all my data had been wiped from it.

I'm wondering first of all if my data can be restrored from it as the photos especially are very important to me and secondly how this might of happend that the hard drive as far as i can tell has formatted its self.

Any help you guys can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Aaron

[DaveBurnett]

Try it in a different machine.
Unless you formatted the drive or deleted all the data I suspect it is just a question of it not being recognised properly.

As long as you do NOT do any writing or other drive write operations to that drive, there is a very good chance that a reasonably competent technician will be able to recover most, if not all the data.

[win2kpro]

Many times what you describe is caused by a failure of the enclosure adapter. As DaveBurnett stated, often it is a fairly simple process to recover your data.

If you get this problem corrected, remember that an external hard drive is for back ups and should not be used as single storage media. Always leave a copy of what you need to save on your internal hard drive and just use the external as a back up to the internal hard drive.

If you have important data, music, photographs, etc. that you definitely don't want to lose, it is also a good idea to make back up copies to CD's or DVD's. With the original copy and 2 back ups you are always fairly sure of not putting yourself in a position to lose important files.

[apope8]

thanks for the replies guys, i will bring it to the local computer shop and ask them to have a look. I definitly wont be keeping everything on the external harddrive in future. Lesson learned!!!!