External Hard Drive Not Recognized!!

nat.martin17

I have a Maxtore external hard drive that must be plugged into the wall to work. I haven't used it in awhile, but had originally formatted it for both MAC and PC systems. I am now trying to get files from it for a demo reel, but neither computer is recognizing it.

On my MAC, I have opened Disk Utility. The light in the hard drive is on and it sounds like it's trying to load, but nothing shows up in the left hand column of disk utility.

On my PC, the light won't even come on and the computer is not recognizing the USB connection.

I'm afraid maybe I formatted it wrong initially, but what I really need is to get my files from this drive. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to recover my files without having to buy expensive software??

Thanks!

sychial

Maybe the USB/Firewire cord, power cord, or the connection it goes into went bad. Buy another cable or buy one of those SATA/IDE/EIDE to USB connectors, about 30 bucks, and pull out the drive from its enclosure and hook it up to it and see if your system will see it then. Remember, you can always return something if it doesn't help. I doubt that it's the way you formatted the drive because if you were able to put files on it then you should still be able to see those files, either way it should still see the drive... whether the filesystem is readable or not. I wouldn't even bother with a data recovery software, they are ok when your file system tables become messed up or when you delete a file, but they are no good, from my experience, for major drive failures if that's what it comes out to be.