Hey all,

I have a Western Digital 250 gig Passport external hard drive, that just took a crap on me, or something.  My PC will not access it any more at all.  Its less than 3 months old, and suddenly, my PC tells me that if I want to access the drive, it will need to reformat it.

Its plug and play, and never had any problems at all. If I re-format it, there is no guarantee it will work, and I will lose all of my data.

Is there a program or something that I can use to salvage my files on this thing?

Or does any one else know of a fix to this problem other than replacing it?

Thanks, a million!

Jason

So the problem is that Windows (I assume that's what you are running) cannot access the drive? You could try burning a Knoppix live CD and see if it can still access it. I've been in a few situations where Windows could not access a partition on an external drive only to find I could still reach it through Linux and save my data.

I agree with Zorbfish. Knoppix has saved my ass a few times. Good luck!

I will give it a shot and cross my fingers.
Thanks.

sigh.

no dice.

says that "mount: I could not determine the file systems type, and none was specified."

You could try explicitly specifying the type. It might not work, but it's probably worth a shot.

Syntax:
mount -t vfat <target> [destination] #for FAT32
mount -t ntfs <target> [destination] #for NTFS

And, if you have sufficient free space, you could try dumping the entire partition to a file that you could then try repairing and mounting as a filesystem later. The utility you'd use to do this is dd.

Syntax: dd if=<block device, the 'target' parameter for mount> of=<output file> #there are other options that will give you more control over how this works, but that should be sufficient for a raw dump

You could then try using the appropriate fsck utility (fsck.vfat, fsck.ntfs) on the file to see if you can rebuild enough of its table to be able to mount the file as a virtual device and recover some of your data.

There are a few other options, too, but since I'm unfamiliar with Windows, I don't know which ones might be applicable.