Hard drive fail.

[hazliya]

I'd been having issues with my external hard drive, but now I think that they've all come together at once. I just installed Windows Service Pack 3, and now it refuses to acknowledge my external hard drive's existence. Plus, now Windows lags like crazy.

Yes, it recognizes that there is a drive there. I can remove it with the "remove hardware safely" window. When it pops up, Windows makes the "hey, there's a drive" noise but nothing else happens.
I've tried unplugging and replugging in every order I can think of. I've rebooted. Nothing.

I also tried to read it in Ubuntu, which has worked before, but Ubuntu said that the drive is unmountable because the drive is apparently still trying to talk to windows. Constantly.

I have no idea what to do. There's so much on this hard drive that I want to keep, but apparently can't get to at all.

This is really, really frustrating.

Is it possible to rip the hard drive part out of an external like that and read it somehow else, or does it actually have to be functioning to be readable?

I'm on the verge of tears. I moved my files onto the external so that this would not happen. Now, nowhere is safe to keep anything important, and that's unacceptable.

Comments

[crash-mccormick.livejournal.com]

Good luck. If its odd drive logic I often Run spinrite on the disk for a while since it boots a spearate little mini O?S and can sometimes mount and fix things wondows has problems with.

[purple-dj.livejournal.com]

There's also an extremely powerful free collection of tools available as SystemRescueCD (http://www.sysresccd.org) that has recovered numerous almost-dead hard drives for me. I didn't recommend it immediately since it has a learning curve like a brick wall -- if you don't have a Linux guru handy to make it work, it's almost useless.