This is quite possibly my 4th dead hard drive in 2 months, any ideas...?

[Shmee150]

Hi guys,

Some of you may have read my previous messages. Somebody really doesn't like me with hard drives because I've had 3 seperate instances of drives dying for whatever reasons (1 fail, 1 static, 1 drop) and now a 4th is playing up on me.

It's in a USB caddy and been working fine in recent weeks. I just plugged it back in but it doesn't seem to be working and Vista throws this error at me: "The hard disk needs to be formatted before it can be used" and offers to format now which I obviously have not pressed. So what can I do?

What might have happened? It hasn't moved anyway, hasn't been touched other than the USB cable being unplugged and then re-plugged to my laptop and it's not looking very good. There's a tonne of important stuff on here and I really am not up for paying hundreds of pounds for another recovery, any ideas?

Cheers for reading,

Tim

[Shmee150]

hmm should have tried this first, just removed the drive from the caddy, reseated it and then it works. Thank god, but you can see where I'm coming from about being edgy over these drives dying on me!