Hi, I am new at this. I have a Hitachi external hard drive with lots of pictures on it. Out of the blue it said to use I have to format. If I did that I would loose everything...so I am trying to retrieve the pics and Recuva says it is "unable to read boot sector". Help, what does that mean and can I get around it? Any advise would help as my lively hood is in these pics.
Perhaps run a chkdsk on the external drive.
I don't know what your operating system is but here is a bit of info
http://www.ehow.com/how_2052292_run-chkdsk-f-windows-xp.html
Did you do this by the way?
http://docs.piriform.com/recuva/using-recuva/recovering-files-from-damaged-or-reformatted-disks
Can you hear if the disc is actually spinning up?
Can you hear the armature randomly bumping back & forth during the POST?