External Hard Drive says I have no space free or used?

Question

Okay I have a Seagate Expansion Portable HDD. It has 500 gb, I have used it before and it should have 29 or so GB used on it to prove so. But, recently it started registering as a Local Disk instead of an Expansion drive like it was doing before. I hadn't used much of the space so I just went with it and continued to use it. Today I tried to use it and at first it came up with nothing on it at all. I mean I pulled up the HDD in my Computer and the screen went blank when I entered the Hard Drive. So I checked the properties, the properties said it was 500 gb and 29 or so gb where used. So I tried again to no avail. So I unplugged it and plugged it back up, now it says I have no space free or used on the Hard Drive. I am completely baffled at what is going on. Is it the HDD? And if so are there any ways I can recover the files? All my computers files except the operating system and a few games had been shifted over to it. Thus the reason 29 gb of it was used. Any help out there?

Update:

Oh, btw my OS is Win XP

Anonymous · Answer

this is a techical subject and not actual ordinary to describe...yet i will attempt... and earlier any actual "techies" get on my butt...i'm in basic terms utilising examples for simplicity. Harddrives are divided into tracks...X quantity of tracks to a hard disk drive...those tracks are X quantity of MBs consistent with song. we could basically say that your hard disk drive has X quantity of tracks and each and each song will carry 4MBs of information. Now you have a pair of information that are 15 MBs in length. The hard rigidity starts off recording on the right song a million..tracks a million, 2, and 3 will each and each take 4 mbs for an entire of 12 MBs...song 4 will carry the the rest 3 to end the report. the subsequent report to be burned will start to be recorded in song 5 and pass contained in the direction of the comparable technique. You in certainty have lost 2MBs of cupboard area. you in basic terms mandatory 30 MBs of area...yet used 32. this is an over simplification of the subject. A hard disk drive formatted interior the NTFS trend makes plenty greater powerful use of the HD's area...and hence much less area this is lost. So...specific...this is in basic terms obtainable which you haven't any longer have been given sufficient room left on the disk to checklist to it. What you ought to do is a defrag on it and then attempt lower back. desire this facilitates Gary

? · Answer

try the external in a different computer and see if it shows...that will eliminate whether its the computer or external hard-drive.

if it works fine on another computer then have you computer checked for a virus.

if it acts the same way on another computer then the first thing I would do is replace the hard-drive enclosure, I have seen many of them go bad...simply remove the hard-drive from the enclosure you have now and install it into a new one similair to this one...

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6321566&Sku=U12-40901

make sure you get the correct size...its either a laptop size hard-drive 2.5 " or desktop size 3.5"

i find the solder points fail on the enclosures.

Cheers

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External Hard Drive says I have no space free or used?

2 Answers