Since this isn't exactly AMV-related, I figured I would post it in this forum. Then again, it could be related, considering that it's going to take my whole AMV collection and all of my own projects with it.
Basically, my external hard drive is dying. It is (was?) a Western Digital 500 GB model, and had I known about the issues in advance, of course I wouldn't have bought it. The damage is done now, though, and as my final efforts to fix things seem to have failed, I'm turning to you folks. I'm posting the issue here and not on some tech forum because you guys know me and when I say that I am an extreme novice in troubleshooting hardware, I know you'll take that into account in your replies. Simply put, please use plain English and assume I know nothing, because that's close enough to the truth.
The problem started about a month and a half ago or so when my external would occasionally decide to shut down while I was actively accessing information (such as playing .mp3s). It would turn back on when I tried to access it again, and then it would behave itself for the rest of the day. Eventually, it started cycling on and off repeatedly, switching every couple of seconds. Eventually, sometimes after a few minutes and sometimes as much as an hour or two, it would level out and stay on, but I couldn't access it. It didn't even appear in the list in My Computer. So, I would unplug it and try again. After a few false starts where it would Autoplay but not actually show what it was attempting to play, the Autoplay would work correctly and I could access it finally. Even this started to fail, though, but I had less than two weeks left of school, and I didn't want to buy a new external when I knew that I could get one on discount if I waited to go home. On the day before I went home, it was still being reasonable, if difficult, but somewhere between then and the first time I powered it up here at home to try and transfer the data to a new external, it's basically become inaccessible. It powers up, but it just cycles endlessly, and if it does level out, my laptop still never recognizes it.
So I did a little research and learned that the majority of externals just have problems with the casing (and the problems that many people had experienced were similar or the same to my own), and if I removed that and installed it into a desktop as a normal hard drive, it would likely work just fine. I've never done that before - both taken apart an external and installed an HDD into a tower, I mean - but I ordered the right cords, Googled some tutorials, and managed to do it flawlessly today.
However, the drive still cycles on and off repeatedly and I still can't access it. Please help if you have any advice at all. Just about all of my hobbies are either digital or can be digitized after the fact, and so I'm not kidding when I say that my life is on there.
- Jen



















