Solved External Hard Drive Problems

Sorry if a thread already exists. I'd looked for one similar to my problem, but couldn't find one that exists that isn't closed...

With that being said, I am running a Vista Home Premium 32-bit & the External Hard Drive I'm having problems with is a Seagate 250GB. The box it was in says 'Expansion'. I've looked over on Seagate site & found no help.

Here's the problem- 2 days ago, my external wasn't showing up on my computer at all. After searching & following tips here & there on the web, I finally got it to show up. I ended up doing the following: 'cmd' as Administrator:
"chkdsk x: /f /r" and press "Enter," substituting "x" with the letter of the USB drive.
From there it scanned the drive & it showed up. The next problem was no permissions to move anything or access anything on the drive. Again, I typed the following commands as Admin. in the command prompt:
cacls H: /E /T /C /G Administrators:F
takeown /f H: /r /a
This gave me 'some' permissions, but not all. I still am finding myself having to manually click on properties to some folders to try to get ownership/ gain permissions. However, with some I get the following error codes:



Other files or folders I try to move, I get the following error:



And some folders I can't open:



I've noticed that the multiple times I attempt this, I've been looking at the manage window & sometimes it says the external drive is 'healthy' & other times it shows as 'RAW'.
At the time of my posting, this is how it looks now:



I have already lost some data on it & I've tried to recover it, using Recuva software as well as others, only to get the I/O error:



I've also clicked on the drive, itself & went into Properties/ Tools & checked for errors.

I've tried using the Seagate Seatools, but it won't scan it.

I run a couple fansites & everything (my life!) is on this external. I had all my data on another external, but that drive failed as well & this one was my backup. Aside from cutting my losses, etc., is there anything else that I can do that I haven't already done? I've been doing everything I can for the past 2 days & any help would be greatly appreciated.

Okay, people, I hope this helps others who may have similar problems.
After trying & trying to recover my data off my external & getting errors as mentioned above, here's what is currently working for me:
I have my external wrapped in a towel on an icepack to keep it very cool.
I have a second external plugged in. I am copying one folder at a time over to the other external. When I start getting the I/O error, I shut off the faulty external that I'm copying my data from & let it rest for 10-15 min. After it's had that rest, I turn it back on & either copy the rest of that folder over or start on the next folder. Keep doing this until you can recover as much data as possible. This should work.
Now, granted, I'm not able to recover 100% of my data, so far, I'm able to recover about 80-90% of it, though & most importantly- a lot of the data that I wasn't able to recover onto my laptop before is copying over to the other external without problems.
I hope this helps any of you out there that are looking for help. This will also save you some moolah & if you're able to get most of your data copied this way, that's better than nothing, right?
If, in the event there is some data that you absolutely have to have that you can't recover after this, then I'd recommend taking it into a data recover expert or downloading a program to attempt the recovery. My guess is you're still going to want to keep that faulty external drive cool & give it rests if you can.
Good luck!