This morning I woke-up and went to open some files on my Maxtor external hard drive and my computer was giving an error message saying that it could not access the file and it was an invalid link. At first I thought it might just be a fluke and I decided to remove the power and USB cords and wait a minute before reconnecting them. After plugging out the USB and the power cords a couple times and waiting, the desktop computer still would not recognize the external hard drive. Then I decided to try and see if my laptop would recognize it, but still no luck. Neither computer could access the external hard drive.
Then I did what I always do when I have a problem: pray and then do a web search. Apparently there are a lot of people that have been in my shoes and not been able to access their external hard drive. At first it seemed that all was lost, so I went to see how much hard drive data recovery from one popular place wouldcost and it said for a hard drive it would start at $259. I certainly did not want to spend $259 for data recovery, even though I did need the data. I continued searching and then found a video that really helped me out.
Recover Data From External Hard Drive – For more funny videos, click here
In the video the guy gave instructions on removing the hard drive from the case that contained it and it would like a normal hard drive like the one in the computer. Then after removing from the case you can install it in your computer like you would normally install an internal hard drive. I was able do to this, but I needed to get an extra data cable to connect the hard drive to the motherboard. The data cable that was originally part of the external hard drive was too short to use. I found an extra data cable in an older computer that I had since 2001 and that I now just use for part. Installing the hard drive required that I do some reading in the manual for my HP Pavilion desktop computer. When all was said and done the hard drive was installed and I was able to access the data that I thought I lost. The hard drive was not the problem it was something going on with the case and the connectors. I am happy for the internet because it really has saved me a lot of cash over the years.
Now I have an internal hard drive that used to be my external hard drive, but that is okay because I can now access the data and I didn’t have to spend hundreds of dollars to do it
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