8 Reasons Why Your External Hard Drive May Corrupt
Computer not detecting external Hard Disk Drive? Probably you are looking for answers of that question and that’s why you are here. Extracting data form corrupt or inaccessible external hard drive isn’t an easy job and you might need to go through little advanced troubleshooting steps.
External hard drive has moving equipment’s same as in the traditional laptop or desktop hard disk drive. Hard drive equipment like platters, read/write head or spindle motor may imminently stops working due to unavoidable damages or completed lifespan which may ultimately cause inaccessibility or damages to your external hard disk drive.
Reasons why your external hard drive may become inaccessible or corrupt
- Formatting Errors
External hard drives easily get affected by viruses, malware or Trojan attacks etc. These kind of virus attacks will malfunction firmware or damages file system and thus leads to format errors. It’ll prevent you to perform any formatting operations on external hard drive. - Improper connectivity of external hard drive
Sometime, because of improper connectivity, external hard drive might not shows up or not accessible. Check external hard drive cable connection first or use different ports and see if that drive is now accessible. - Read/Write head crash
A read/write head is the most significant part of hard disk and it is responsible for reading data from and writing data to hard disk. The read/write head is extremely small and tangible part of disk which is made up of a thin horizontal magnetic blade. As explained earlier, hard drive moving equipment like read/write head may become damaged and prevent normal functioning of your external hard drive. - File System corruption
External storage device become unreadable because of file system corruption. NTFS or FAT files system on your external hard disk gets corrupt and because of this, Computer may not detect drive. Hence, you may permanently lose access to your stored data. - Accidentally Dropping
Hard drives are very sensitive in nature, even the smallest bump can create problem. If it is accidently slipped from your hands and stopped working properly, it means some part of external drive is physically damaged or broken. - Damaged power cable or case
May be the power cable or case is kaput, try to exchange the case with another case or try different power cable and see if it may start working again. - Bad sectors and blocks
Some time your drive reports number of bad sectors derived by course of uses and formatting or read/write operations performed. Large number of bad sectors would make your drive unreadable or freeze. You need to replace your external hard disk drive as soon as possible or before the drive failed permanently. - Unknown errors
You can’t access your hard disk drive because of number of other unknown errors. Different errors include:- "Hard drive isn’t formatted, format it first."
- "H:\ isn’t accessible"
- "The type of the file system is RAW"
You cannot fix all of them but can perform the background check and point out the root cause. This will help you in opting for the most relevant solution.
About this post
Posted: 2015-10-08
By: lslizzysmith002@gmail.com
Viewed: 21,769 times
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tomsmith posted this comment on 2016-04-14:
Hi Lizzy,
I have 2 TB Seagate hard drive and it is working fine, but some of the folders stored in the drive are not accessible. I think it is because of bad sectors. Can you please tell me how I can fix bad sectors and access those folders.
AnonymousCoward posted this comment on 2016-12-05:
I have a 1TB WD hard drive and it was working fine but all of a sudden, after my computer did some updates (hard drive was unplugged) it stopped working D:
dwirch posted this comment on 2016-12-05:
Hey Anon -
Have you tried plugging the hard drive into a different computer to see if it works on a different machine?
If it does work, you can try rolling back the update(s) on your primary computer, reboot, and try plugging it in again.
If it does not work, then something might be wrong with the drive.
AnonymousCoward posted this comment on 2018-05-06:
Is it possible that a "bad" computer, ie one with problems, could corrupt and external WD portable hard drive? Thank you.
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AnonymousCoward posted this comment on 2016-02-11:
Hi Lizzy, thanks for sharing reasons of hard drive corruption. It helped me a lot to know more about hard drive and factors that can affect hard drive easily.