Well, it's happened! As a result of external hard drive storage becoming affordable, I decided to make a 'hard drive' duplicate of my CDs and DVDs. I bought 2 LaCie 500GB external drives (Big Disk). I spent hours transferring RAW & Tiff inages to them. One of the Big Disks I reserved for the images from my recent trip. I spent hours sorting the RAW files into appropriate folders.140GB of them. Fortunately, I didn't save any processed images to this hard drive, because it has now become corrupted. I seem to have lost access to all those 140GB of RAW images on the drive.
I've tried plugging the drive into the USB socket of other computers, but with the same result. The hard drive is recognised in 'hardware devices'. The driver appears to be working properly. But I can't find the drive in 'my computer', in 'windows explorer', or in Bridge.
I seem to have a drive in perfect working order which is invisible.
Geez! It's fortunate I've got this stuff backed up on DVD. The problem I now have is, this drive is still under warranty. Do I take it back to the store and hand over all my precious images, which might be copied by some unscrupulous employee who takes a fancy to my images and possibly sells them to some third party?
I've got no idea whether the images can be retrieved. However, if they are going to be retrieved, I'd like it to be me who does it.
Any advice would be appreciated.