Problems with portable hdd

I seriously need help, my external hard drive has crashed. It's an Simpletech 120 gb usb hdd, its formatted in fat32. I tried sharing some files with a PC user, but it wouldn't show up, except for a sec while removing the device. Afterwards it wouldn't mount on my MAcbook. Diskutility doesnt work. It reads "could not read boot block" and then :"The underlying task reported failure on exit". What can i do? Is the data lost? What program could help me out? The data is really important to me.

regards Anders Jensen

Bangand said:

I seriously need help, my external hard drive has crashed. It's an Simpletech 120 gb usb hdd, its formatted in fat32. I tried sharing some files with a PC user, but it wouldn't show up, except for a sec while removing the device. Afterwards it wouldn't mount on my MAcbook. Diskutility doesnt work. It reads "could not read boot block" and then :"The underlying task reported failure on exit". What can i do? Is the data lost? What program could help me out? The data is really important to me.

regards Anders Jensen

Click to expand...

Sounds like an interface problem being that the drive would only mount on the PC when it was being disconnected. Have you tried a different USB cord?

Worst case scenario, I would try removing the drive from the casing, installing it internally onto a PC and try running CHKDSK or Disk Management on Windows. Once the disk structure is repaired, you should be able to see your data again on a Mac. The problem is getting disk utilities that are designed to run on FAT32 partitions to actually see the drive.

If you're not that familiar with hardware or have a PC available to you, I'm sure any competent technician should be able to give you a diagnosis and recover your data easily.

*Moved thread to proper forum*

The chord is functioning just fine. Could i run chkdsk or disk management without removing it from casing? What program would competent technicians use?

Bangand said:

The chord is functioning just fine. Could i run chkdsk or disk management without removing it from casing? What program would competent technicians use?

Click to expand...

If the disk doesn't mount on a Windows machine (i.e., it doesn't show up as a drive in 'My Computer), then no tools are going to work. Assuming there's a problem with the USB interface on the drive, you can bypass that by removing it from the casing and installing it via the internal bus on a PC.