It seems inevitable that at some point in our lives, the technology we take for granted will fail us.
As a techie for many years, I’ve come to understand the importance of backing up all of my valuable work on external drives. And when it comes to personal stuff like pictures and videos, we always hold on to the notion of “well, I have a good computer, I shouldn’t be worried about losing my stuff”. Wrong. WRONG!
This is technology we’re talking about, people, IT WILL FAIL US! So what did I do when one of my backup computers refused to boot? Well I always have a solution to everything, so I took the hard drive out and used it as an external hard drive. Well, what did I do when I attempted to use my backup drive as an external storage unit…BUT IT DIDN”T WORK?! When I double-click it it says the hard drive needs to be formatted before it can be used. No, NO! Not an option for me.
I attempted to run a check disk and repair on my external drive F: ( Run > cmd > chkdsk f: /r ), but half way through it kept running into errors. But I did find a solution that repaired my hard drive and made it accessible and bootable again.
Acronis Disk Director Home. I downloaded the demo version of this program from Download.com. To see if it actually recognized my hard drive the way it said it did, I right clicked on my external drive and selected “browse files” and what do you know, it did show my file folders and listed the actual files. But of course, at this point they are still inaccessible. But that’s ok. The fact that my files can be read gave me hope that they are still recoverable.
So I right clicked on the external drive and selected “check”. After an hour or so, it was completed with no stoppage, no errors, and a success message. I restarted my computer and what do you know, the drive worked! When I plugged it in the auto-run options come up!…But there’s nothing there. When I tried to open the folder it says “Drive not accessible, Permission not granted.” But that made me extremely happy because permission not granted only means that I have to grant permission to files on the hard drive to myself. Simple as that!
So yes, I was able to make a hard drive that wouldn’t boot and was not accessible as an external hard drive work again thanks to the Acronis Disk Director Home edition. It was just the demo version but it did the job perfectly and easily. This is one piece of software that works and that’s why I recommend it.
Acronis website. Consider purchasing the full version license.
Downloaded from free from Download.com
