I recently added a partition to my external hard drive in order to make it compatible with my xbox 360. I set this partition to primary.

Soon after while deleting something I got the error "Recycle bin on G: is corrupt" or something of the sort. I ignored it planning to deal with it later.

It was working fine until I unplugged it and plugged it back in. When I did this the hard drive made a clicking noise for about 15 minutes before displaying a message something like: "Portable device has malfunctioned" which then brought up a display of all USB ports, showing my external hard drive as the problem device.

I turned it off and turned it on again, this time it made only the normal "reading" noise, but wasn't detected by my computer. Nothing shows up in my computer, and Easus partition managers doesn't detect the device.

However - when I turn my PC on and have the hard drive on it seems to try and boot from the primary partition on that, or at least read from it (resulting in a blank black screen until I restart my PC)


My xbox doesn't recognize the device either.


I've got several hundred GBs of stuff on this drive and really need to get it working. Does anyone know what went wrong and how to fix it?

Take the hard drive out and put it in the freezer over night. Wait. Plug it into your computer. You now have 5-20 minutes to get as much shit off as you can. At most you will be able to get about 35 gigabytes off the drive before it completely fails, if the freezer trick works at all.
The clicking noise should have alarmed you.

http://www.warezrocker.net/ebooks/6867-200-ways-to-revive-a-hard-drive-digital.html