I use a 500 GB external-USB Buffalo Hard disk. It has been working fine till 2 days ago. I used to use it in three different systems (all windows 7) and there was never any problem.
Two days ago a friend of mine borrowed it and connected it to his system. But, as per him, the system did not recognize the hard disk. (I don't know what he did. He says, he has not done anything). Now, even my system is also not reading the hard disk. Suddenly the disk is not recognized by any of my three systems.
Symptoms:
1. Light blinks occasionally.
2. There is a sound from the hard-disk. (seems the disk is rotating)
3. In my computer, only C:// and D:// (CD) drives are shown. The hard disk used to be E:// drive.
4. In command prompt , when I run the command "list disk", the status is "online" and size is 0 B.
5. In "Device Manager" I can see the name of the hard disk-BUFFALO USB Device within "Disk Drives"
6. Within Computer Management> Storage> Disk Management, the external hard-disk does not have a drive name assigned. In the lower half of the screen,Disk1 is shown as
- small red downward arrow
- Unknown
- Not initialized.
When I right click> Initialize, I get the error "Incorrect Function".
Can someone please help. The hard disk has lots of important data.
Thanks in advance
Manash