files no longer open on hard drive

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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Author
carolineholding
Posts: 1
Joined: 02 Feb 2013, 13:20

files no longer open on hard drive

#1 Post by carolineholding »

hello all

First up I'm going to apologize profusely for not being very computer literate. Sorry!

About a year ago I bought a seagate goflex free agent hard drive with a capacity of 500gb. Yesterday out of the blue I stopped being able to open the files on it. My neatly arranged folders no longer look like folders, they look like stylised sheets of paper with folded over corners. They don't appear to be taking up any space but the space they do take up is still missing from the hard drive, that is to say when i look I can see that there is only 345gb left. When I click on them they can't identify an app to open them with and then when I hit ok another grey box with error 43 appears. At first

The drive has never been partitioned, and I am using a mac book, I found out recently that the drivers that I installed to use the hard drive enable my mac to recognise the files, instead of the hard drive being formatted to save the file as mac files (does that make sense?) so when i try to share my files with other mac users it doesn't work. I haven't tried sharing them with PC/Linux users. I haven't dropped the hard drive, it hasn't got wet, I did down load drop box recently and I've noticed that the hard drive now has a drop box icon on it. I'm wondering if the mac/pc formatting thing combined with me installing drop box has confused the hard drive? (i did warn you -I'm not very computer literate). I have an app for testing the hard drive, which has -unsurprisingly, failed but given me no other info.

Anyway, I'm going to carry on reading stuff on this site, and attempt to download the software if I can work out which bit i need, but any ideas about what wrong and what I should do would be great, and thoughts on whether I'll be able to retrieve my data. Is it likely I will I be able to use the hard drive again? (I haven't got enough space on my computer to hold the data if i need reformat the hard drive) and I'm literally in the middle of no where with no money.

thanks in advance

Caroline

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