"not accessible the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

[nikko]

I'm trying to help out a friend who just bought an external hard drive. He
literally just got it yesterday. He backed up all his documents and all was
well. But apparently in addition to using the hard drive for back up, he was
running a couple of programs off it, including one that creates a virtual
drive or something like that. Anyway, now when he tries to access the hard
drive, he gets a message that says "H drive is not accessible; the file or
directory is corrupted and unreadable". Does that mean his drive is
unusable? Can it be salvaged? Does he need to do a reformat? If so, how
would he go about doing that? Thanks in advance for any help you can
provide.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

External hard drives normally connect to USB or Firewire ports. The first
thing to do is to un-plug it from the PC and then re-plug it (using the
exact same port). If this works, then you may have to check in Device
Manager so as to make sure that the port used has not been told to "power
down" by XP.

 

[Art]

External hard drives normally connect to USB or Firewire ports. The first
exact same port). If this works, then you may have to check in Device
Manager so as to make sure that the port used has not been told to "power
down" by XP.

nikko:
I really can't see how Yves' suggestion to disconnect the external hard
drive and then reconnect it will help. But I suppose there's no harm in
trying it.

You mentioned the problem arose after your friend ran a program that
"creates a virtual drive or something like that." Might it be wise to
contact the program's developer to determine if they've run across this
problem and have any solution? Ditto for the other programs he accessed from
the external drive just before the problem arose. You might also want to try
a Google search for "hard drive restore programs" and/or "data recovery" to
determine if there are any restoration programs that might be helpful in
this situation.

Another possible approach, if feasible, is to remove the HD from its USB (I
assume it's a USB device) enclosure and install it as an internal IDE HD in
your friend's computer to determine if the data can be accessed through that
means. However, if the HD is in a sealed enclosure this might not be
possible. And even if so, it might void the warranty on the unit.
Art

 

[cd-text]

Thanks Nikko

I'm running XP with SP2.

I have been using an external 40 Gigabyte iRiver drive for about a year with

no problem (except while I had Norton System Works 2003 installed).

I already had installed a program called Alcohol 120% which has a virtual

DVD. When you install the program the default is to install 1 virtual DVD. (I

don't have any files on the hard drives linked to the virtual DVD).



I then bought 2 external hard drives which are connected via FireWire.

Initially they both worked for a while. Then, typically when I re-booted my

computer, it would say "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable."

More recently, a slightly different error was occruing which was "J:\ is not

accessible. The parameter is incorrect".



I can strongly recommend Runtime's GetDataBack software. I've tried a few others and they don’t recover all the files or the files they do display they don’t show the correct file name.

 

[cd-text]

Thanks Nikko Part 2

I have continued to restore the data on my external hard drives and then reformat the drives. However, the errors have continued to occur.



After searching far and wide for an answer over the last few months, I have just come across your post. So I have just now removed the virtual DVD drive from Alcohol 120%. This did not fix the error of "J:\ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect" from occurring. But I will now recover the data and then reformat the drive and I will see whether the error occurs again.



I hope it does fix the problem. Because restoring the data and reformatting the drive takes forever.



What I can’t understand is why the 40gig (iRiver) drive I have connected via USB works perfectly yet the 2 external HDD connected via Firewire keep having these errors. The only thing I can think of is that iRiver I had use for one year before I installed alcohol and then the external HDDs I got about 6 months after installing Alcohol 120%.