External Hard Drive

[dum626]

I have a 160 GB Lacie external hard drive, this morning when I tried to access the drive it was working very slowly. I restarted the computer, and the hard drive. Now I can't access the drive. When I plug it in it is detected as USB mass storage device, and as a drive, but it’s not given a drive letter. When I access disk management it either won't show the drive or disk management won't come up at all. I tried running disk prompt from the command line and the same thing happened, either Diskpart wouldn't work, or Diskpart couldn't find the drive. Right now my top priority is to recover my data, I understand that my hard drive may not be fixable, but if anyone knows a way for me to recover my data that would be good.

I am running Windows XP

My computer is an AMD 64 3200+
with a VIA K8T400 motherboard.

[glc]

Remove the drive from the housing, it's just a standard IDE drive in there. Jumper it appropriately and put it into the computer, see if it's accessible.

[dum626]

Thanks for the reply, my question now is does anyone know how to take apart one of the lacie hard drives designed by f.a. porsche? It has no screws in it, but it appears the top can be removed. I've tried a little prying to no avial, I don't want to further damage the drive so i haven't tried anything to invasive, if anyone has any ideas i'd appreciate the feed back.

[glc]

If it's anything like the Bytecc housings I use, there are plastic strips on each side that snap on and off and hold the 2 halves together.