My friend was at my house today with an external HDD getting music off my computer and after he had already transfered about 10 gig of music over (not all in one go, it was seperate files at a time) the process stalled. After that my computer would see his HDD but its name wasnt showing up and whenever i would try and open it explorer would stall or if i left it for a few minutes it would ask me if i want to format the HDD.

I have since taken the HDD to a friends house and the same thing happened on his computer, i really need this fixed as all his music is on this drive and he is a dj.

All help appreciated.

haha... now he can't play "live" shows... hahaha the ironing is delicious

shh B.
He's a dj, not a Musician :P

On the flipside, make an image of the external (to be safe), format said external HDD, use a data recovery tool an you'll be fine

If he can't do it, bring it to me an I'll do it for a fee (I like Wild Turkey Rare Breed)

stellar phoenix (its free and it rocks)

doesn't he have a backup... he should hdd's are so cheep these days

How can i access the corrupted HDD to make an image of it when every time i try to access it explorer crashes.

Most external drives and enclosures are crap, especially if they are USB. I find eSATA ones are more reliable.

Get a copy of SystemRescueCd (Linux-based recovery environment), burn to CD and boot off it. Should be more reliable than Windows in general:

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

You'd be creating an image from a DOS level therefore there will be no aids explorer to cry at you.

You'd be creating an image from a DOS level

Define "DOS level"

I've taken my external HDD (nexstar 3) to many windows machines and it has been plug and play everytime, no worries.

Then again I've seen people with some really s*** slow ones that fail to get recognised all the time.

not in an operating system, off a boot disk