Windows 7 - Hitachi Hard Drive Help?

Sorry for making another thread about an external hard drive that's stopped working, but I've looked through the other threads and some of the problems they have experienced are similar, but are not the same to mine.

I have a Hitachi 5K500 B-250 250GB external USB hard drive. It's worked fine for a couple of months, but now it appears to have given up the ghost!

Before, when I would plug it into the USB port, the autoplay option would come up, and it would settle itself as Drive J (Device named EHD) and would work perfectly. However, when I plugged it in yesterday, the autoplay menu did not come up. It appeared in my computer as 'Local Disk' in Drive E.

I cannot access the data on the disk whatsoever, and when I plug the EHD in it slows my computer down significantly which it didn't do before. If I try to go into the Local Disk's properties or go into disk management or anything like that my computer slows to a crawl and the window(s) become unresponsive. CHKDSK function doesn't seem to pick it up either.

I downloaded a data recovery tool which was able to pick up the drive and view the data stored within it, however it was very expensive software so i'm hoping to avoid that if I can.

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this and offer any advice!

Thanks again!
Leon.

Hello LeonArlott. Welcome to the Forum.

The first thing I would try is to connect that external drive to another computer to see if it behaves the same on anther system. Depending on what happens with that test we can determine the best course of action.

To try and recover the data from that drive you could try the free version of Paragon: Rescue Kit Free Edition | PARAGON Software Group - free partition software, hard disk partitioning , a program recommended by member Gregrocker here.

I would also download and burn a CD with the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (ISO) and see if you can test the drive with that.
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

Thanks very much for the reply. I had tried the device on my mother's computer, same issue occured.

I dowloaded the files from the links you sent me but I cannot get them to work! Whether I burn them to a disc or mount them on a virtual drive, all they do is allow me to view the files... :/

Any other advice?

Thanks again,
Danny

Both of those downloads are .ISO files. They create bootable media from a CD image.
All you do in Windows 7 is double click the downloaded file and a window should come up asking if you want to burn the ISO to a CD. You do so, and then simply put the disk in the CD/DVD drive and restart the computer. If you have your "Boot Order" set in BIOS to boot from CD before the hard drive (recommended) then the programs should start up, bypassing Windows.

EDIT: Sorry, here is the correct procedure:
Burn Disc Image - ISO or IMG file

I use Nero, so I was trying to recall that procedure from (failing) memory .

On the surface at least, it looks like the drive has failed or in the midst of failing. The software TVeblen gave you may ....may be able to repair the drive to a state so you can recover your files to another one. Let us know the outcome of the Hitachi fitness test.