External Maxtor 250GB USB/FIREWIRE - HELP!!

[buttwhacker]

I have a toshiba Laptop with Win XP Pro SP2 and I use this external HD (NTFS) for backing up DVDs and other stuff......

I had a bunch of MP3 and Softwares in my store computer - Dell WIN XP Home.

I usually use the firewire conexion with my laptop but the dell desktop does not have that so I used the USB conexion to transfer data from that computer and the networked WIN98 SE (FAT32) computer to this drive.

Everything went fine while transfering, then I decided to defrag the drive using the Dell desktop and it gave a message which I dont know what coz i was not there and my colleague did not read the msg. and just clicked on OK, so I dont know if it got defraged or not and what the msg. was.

Now when I conect to any of the computers it says "Drive is not formatted, do u want to format it now", when i run cmd and try to see the dir. it says "the parameters are incorrect"

There is a lotta stuff which I dont wanna lose on this drive..... pls. help, how can I revive this drive

 

[Childs]

Do a quick format on the drive, then use a recovery program like GetDataBack. 2 of 3 Maxtor 250GB drives did this to me. It only happened once on each drive, and after the recovery hasn't happened since. Don't know what the deal is, but they seemed stable after the initial headache.

 

[buttwhacker]

will this bring back all the data in folders within the folders within the folders...... thats where the problem is.....

 

[Childs]

Yeah. the downside is you need to restore this data somewhere.

 

[nealh]

do not format the drive..use a recovery program first...if you format you may lose the ability to retrieve some of the data...best program I found when my drive died was ACR Data Recovery

http://www.atl-datarecovery.com/software.htm

it was the only program that was able to recovery any of my data