Always have a hard drive failure? I. Here is my story:

I placed my late 2009 MacBook Pro Apple to sleep late on a Saturday night. As late at night I have not had the time or the patience to let my computer completely off and have little light in a short time ago, indicating that he was asleep. I jumped the gun and turned my computer on the right side is the hard drive is still running. Some NO, NO, according to Apple. You need to stop the hard drive and wait for the light to vibrate.

The next morning I woke up, ready to enter the new page that I developed for my dive photography business. My Macbook Pro awoke without incident and I thought everything was ok. Adobe Lightroom and do not save a file, I worked. He said he needed a place to store the files I was working. I said, “You moron have a place, it means the hard drive.” I restarted as I do, when things is not working well and what I saw next to him was buried in my memory. FILE terrible flash and the question mark. This means talking to Apple, something is wrong. I was later told Apple “genius” to me it was my hard drive. He wanted over $ 200 with taxes for the repair and yet I would not be able to recover my data without having to send my computer into a data recovery service. NO WAY!

So I did it myself and have all my data for less than $ 100. Here’s how: » Read more: How to Install a New Hard Drive in a Macbook Pro

Unfortunately, the industry standard for formatting not only external hard drives, but internal HDDs and high (I’ll explain later why) Note USB NTFS (New Technology File System). This must be the case today, because it is a size limit that Windows can not handle that formatting in FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32). The border, the windows can be circumvented if the format a FAT32 drive is 32 GB and you will hardly an external hard drive is smaller than in the shops in those days. Of course you can always smaller than most flash drives that come with FAT32 standard, but in reality you are not using a USB stick to games or television programs due to their limited store size.

It is in the external hard drive that the problem really is. If you plug your new drive to open your laptop or PC, Computer and right click to see its properties. I can almost guarantee you he will say to the NTFS file system. This is fine if it used as a backup device to your PC, but not if you connect game consoles or satellite receiver with PVR functionality. » Read more: Formatting an External Hard Drive to FAT32 for Use With an Xbox or PVR Satellite Receiver