external hard drive problems

[Victor]

i just bought 240gb lacie external harddrive. i transferred a bunch of data (music, movies, porn) onto it and it worked fine for a week.

then, all of a sudden, when i plugged it in, i got an error that it was unreadable. i havent gotten it to work since.

so, my questions are:
1) is my data retrievable.
2) why did this happen and how is it prevenable?

[FouTight]

as far as your data, hard to say. how did it happen? it could have happened if the disk was in write mode and got unplugged or powered off.

you may try and reformat it to see if it will take again, but that won't help you recover or data for sure.

[CORed]

Some things to check: Power supply plugged in and working. Bad cable (substitute a known good USB cable). If it's not one of these simple things, probably you got a defective drive. Whether your data is recoverable or not will depend on what's wrong. If it's in the controll ciruitry, it may be recoverable. If the drive itself had head crashed, probably not. If your data is important to you back it up. Hard drives fail. They usually don't fail as quickly as yours (assuming the it did fail), but they all eventually fail. You should be able to get the drive repaired or replaced under warranty, but that won't get your data back.