Greetings, I have bought, quite some time ago, an external 500GB storage LaCie drive. It has been working perfectly until its plug was roughly removed from the outlet...an accident, and apparently a bad one!! I can't access my drive anymore, I got to the "Properties" menu and its file system appeared "RAW" and its used/total bytes is 0... I had 300/500GB used so you imagine the disaster! I went to my local computer shop and they said that they could TRY data recovery for 45€ (for you ~70$) should I go along and pay or is there something I can do to avoid paying about half the money I payed for the HD for its recovery? Best Regards Deimos AMD ATHLON X2 5200+ 2.6GHz ASUS GeForce 8600GTS ASUS M2N-E SLI MB 2xKingston 1GB DDR2 800

You can do the recovery yourself if you have another hard drive or optical drive to recovery the files to. When done recovering the files, go to disk Management to repartition/format the drive. Attaching the drive to a friends computer might be worth a try. If it's accesible on that PC, recovering the files would be easier. Here are a couple of file recovery programs that work pretty well. PC Inspector (freeware) http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinsp... Zero assumption Recovery http://www.z-a-recovery.com The demo is limited It will only recover 'up to' four folders per run But you can make multiple runs You might consider buying another drive with the money you save. You really should have one for backup anyway.

Try running Chkdsk on that drive. For help with that look at the links below. http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Artic... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265

If all the above fails, i'd take it to a propper company instead of the shop as you will probably have done all the shop would do excluding opening the drive. The only recovery that anyone outside of a propper company should do is replace the logic board and in this instance, your logic board sounds fine. The price will be much higher if you choos to go the propper root, but if your datas important enough then that shouldn't matter.

The RAW reading means the drive has lost the file system (format). The drive itself is probably fine. When interrupting a drive that is being written to you can corrupt the file system. Chkdsk may fix that.

ChkDsk worked perfectly!! The HD was mystically returned to its original state! :) Thank you for making me save 45€!! :D Best Regards Deimos AMD ATHLON X2 5200+ 2.6GHz ASUS GeForce 8600GTS ASUS M2N-E SLI MB 2xKingston 1GB DDR2 800