External USB Hd Problems...

[Meractik]

Okay heres the deal, I got a 40 gig hd with 20 gigs of mp3, the entire drive is formatted in FAT32, I have a new laptop i am trying to put the music on, I have the drive plugged into a USB 2.0 enclosure and whenever I try to attach it the system recognizes it and says its ready for use but then when I go to my computer the drive does not show up at all and whenever I go to drive management It shows the drive as not being initialized with the red - sign, I try to initalize it but the system hangs and I have to restart it. Does anyone know of a program i can use externally on a boot cd or something I can use from within windows that allows recovery of FAT32 partitions so I can copy the mp3s to my laptops internal HD? I tried GetDataBack NTFS but it didn't work, only seemed to want to copy the directories and none of the files within them...

 

[redbeard1]

Can the external USB enclosure be seen on another system? I've seen some low end enclosures need a driver installed to get them to work right.

If you take the drive out of the enclosure, and plug it into a regular pc, can you see the files then?

 

[Meractik]

I have been fiddling with it all day, so far I was able to run some drive check program on it from a all-in-one boot cd I had with utilities on it that seems to of fixed the MBR (appearently it was jacked up) and I can now see on the drive and windows recognizes it but tons of my mp3s are missing, so now im running some scan on it to try to recover them thats taking like 200 or some minutes, the drive enclosure works without drivers as i use a different hard drive in it and it works just fine and im able to access the files although that one is NTFS, not sure what happened to this FAT32 drive of mine but i sure hope i can salvage my music. ill update with however the scan turns out.