hannah | Standing on the surface.

Yesterday afternoon I noticed something was wrong with one of my external hard drives. The problem could've well started much earlier, but that was when I saw that instead of showing up as "Drivename (H:)" it was showing up as "H Drive" and saying it needed to be formatted due to it having an issue with recognized file systems. I didn't panic, and turned my computer on and off again. The same thing. I changed USB slots, and still nothing. I set it aside for later; after a family dinner at a nearby restaurant, I started looking up various solutions and ran a couple of Windows commands to check the disc itself. It was a relief to know that the data was there, just cut off from me, so I figured as long as I moved carefully I'd be fine in the long run. I also figured I wasn't going to tackle the problem so late at night.

I went to bed without setting an alarm. Sleeping through most of the morning helped considerably, and after some additional research, checking out a couple of free data recovery programs, I found the solution was within my reach without needing a third party either in software or taking the hard drive to a data recovery office. It was as simple as running a Windows command as an administrator, which was tremendously simple to do. The hard parts were not panicking, and figuring out exactly what the problem was to learn the simple solution.

I still feel really proud of myself about this.