Recently, I acquired an External Drive with a terabyte of memory. Being the music geek that I am, I put all my favorite songs onto the External Drive. I managed to only put enough songs on there to fill up the entire terabyte of memory perfectly. However, a friend of mine decided to watch a movie on my computer. Now, I'm getting an I/O Error every time I try to access the External Drive. I'm guessing that the movie my friend watched downloaded itself onto my External Drive and it went over the memory capacity of it, I can't even get to the files to copy them or back them up.

Does anyone have any ideas of or know how I can fix this? Because I'm definately running out of ideas.

One possibility is to break open that shiny new external enclosure and remove the hard drive and then hook it up to an internal SATA or PATA port on your motherboard. This will rule out the possibility that the enclosure logic board is the culprit (which has happened to me before). You will also get a lot more information from the drive itself if your motherboard has SMART capabilities. Just look in the BIOS to see if it is reporting the hard drive as bad.

If this still doesn’t work then I always recommend SpinRite (http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm) for hard drive problems. It is pricy but it is one of the rare hard drive utilities that actually work.

What brand is your external drive. I know from experience I've had and troubleshooted (ts) laptop drives which are basically what's in the those portable enclosures. Problems I've ran into were power issues (not adequate power, voltage/amps applied to power the device.), some issues center around the usb capabilities of your pc (over even worse the power limitations of some laptops), compatibility of usb 2.0 implementation varies by manufacture.

But if your drive is a terabyte it could must be a the full size ide/pata/sata drives in PCs. If the size is that big... is it one drive or is it a combination of hard drives recognized as one drive. If it is the later I recommend you work directly with the original equipment manufacture's technical support. If it is a single drive then you can try third party recovery utilities.

On of my favorite and also a free ones I currently use is "Recurva". I use this because of the image preview. Just make sure have another backup tera-byte drive to copy to. If you feel competent in your ts abilities then you can try to recover the FAT (file allocation table). I've only successfully accomplished this twice when i was college. I used the program called Active@ File Recovery in 1999/2000. I lost a few times but it was probably cause I was sure what I was doing then.

Just search for the above programs on Google.

I'm surprised nobody as flat out said that the drive is most likely dead. Firmware in the drive itself can cause problems but most of the time I/O errors = drive is failing. Do you hear unusual sounds from the drive or no sound at all? I'd recommend bringing it to a data recovery facility (if you absolutely need the data), and have them assess the situation before trying any recovery software on it. If the drive is physically about to die any added strain on it attempting to read data off it may push it over the edge. Unfortunately hard drives have so many tiny moving parts in them that they are completely unreliable. I've seen drives fail only weeks after purchase and others last years and years.

Another thing to look into as we are now in an age of portables - laptops, memory, music, gaming, external drives - is the quality of the product.

Sometimes the device might have something inside that is rattling (free floating) that shouldn't be. Other times the contacts on the component board has cheap soldering that is creating an 'Open' where it shouldn't be. This is typical of generic brand devices/enclosures/adapters or products from brand name companies that outsource for their connectors and accessories.

So far I've ran into this problem with a few laptop motherboards, power adapters, and USB/IDE/SATA connectors. I had to purchase a low power soldering iron with fine tip and some fine silver solder. It took me more time to disassemble the devices than actually finding and solding contacts.

This is just another last minute option before you toss or something to look into while your curiosity breaks it open.

Why does nobody even think about first using checkdisk before thinking about breaking open a brand new external disk ?

wutske is right. using chkdsk or other disk checking tools is much wiser. Try to google it using the error msg, maybe you'll get a clue.