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Hard Drive Failure

I work for a small accountants and was asked by the boss to find a decent external disk drive that we could use at home or away from the office. After a look round I decided upon the Seagate Freeagent Desk 1.5TB drive that works off USB 2.0. I was pleased with my purchase to begin with and all was going well. So much so that I bought another two when the boss asked me to. Then the problems started because after about 4 months of taking the Freeagent back and forward to work and to clients’ it started making a noise like a distressed cat. I immediately tried making a backup which is ironic because the Freeagent is supposed to be for backups, but it would not allow me to access the drive and told me that it was no longer installed. I tried attaching it to the computer in the office but explorer would not pick it up and eventually it just stopped working altogether. I now have an external drive full of data that I can’t extract and a boss who has doubts about my IT knowledge. Not only has the drive let me down but it has made me look foolish. I know you can’t do anything about how I look to my boss but is there anything you can do about my lost information.

I’m using an Iomega 34237 1TB Home Network drive for the purposes of storing all of my iTunes purchases as well as my own music. I have a small recording studio in the garage on the back of my house and spend a lot of time recording my own music and the music of other people who rent my space. The NAS was working great to begin with then after a while it started playing up and demanding that I download drivers and firmware etc. I did what it asked and the drive started functioning normally again so I thought all was well. Then without warning the whole thing just stopped working altogether and I could not access the drive. I downloaded some disc repair software and set to work and when I got the drive operational again all seemed wonderful. Then out of the blue I developed the blue screen of death and that happens every time I try to read or write anything to the Iomega. Even stranger is that the drive has suddenly partitioned itself – because I certainly didn’t do it – and I have E, F, G and H drives on a single drive which makes no sense. Help me if you can please? I’ve got a young and up and coming band’s music on there that I can’t get at and they’re not best pleased.