Hard Drive Failure w/ 10.04

[Basher101]

you said its an external drive?

Just take the drive out of the casing and put it directly into the computer. The usb interface could be bad.

possible too

but considering its an external usb drive, you will have to open the case (which could break it if you do not know how to do)

[upchucky]

I suggest booting your machine with a ubuntu live cd or knoppix 5.1
Knoppix has both qparted and gparted partitioners on it.
I have had drives that did not respond to gparted but responded to qparted and vice versa.
This is just to test if the drive can be talked to.
If any of the partitioners can read the drive information on the drive then it is likley ok.
You do not want to partition the drive at this moment, you just want to prove it is still somewhat functioning.
Next I would try one or more of the following free live drive forensic cds and try to recover the data from the drive.

forensicswiki.org/wiki/Tools#Forensics_Live_CDs

Lastly I would disassemble the drive and use a usb adaptor kit to connect it to a known good USB port on your computer and then try the partitioners and forensic cd's again.

In the event that the data is unrecoverable but the partitions can be read, you may have to bite the bullet and delete the drive partition(S) and create new partitions. deleting the partitions will permanently erase the data.