external hard drive issue

[Brodieboy143]

i was doing some school work on my pc today while decompressing my external hard drive (Maxtor onetouch II 300gb usb 2.0) when i got the dreaded blue screen of death. i rebooted and when windows loaded Maxtor onetouch manager said that my drive had an unrecognized or no partition and it is inacessable from windows. disk management utility states that the drive is unknown type and not initialized. what has happened and what can i do

[Steve R Jones]

OUCH. I hate it what that happens. Might give the following a try:

PC Inspector File Recovery
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinspector.html

[Sterling_Aug]

I stopped letting people use disk compression back around 1996 when a friend lost all his data.

You could also try this program, but you have to buy it before you can recover the data:

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

I use it for work and it has recovered data from a drive that even the BIOS couldn't see.

[leprechaun_40]

You might also want to try File Scavenger 3. I've used it on a drive that windows said had no partions, etc. You can download a demo free but to actually recover the data you need to buy it. Well worth the $49 though. It will even allow you to save to a different machine over the network if you need to.

Linky

[Brodieboy143]

ok so pc file inspector recovery didn't work or i wasn't using it properly. all it came up with were files i deleted before the problem occurred. i searched for lost files and it came up with a lot of files all the same size and all named by cluster. i tries getdataback which found the files, proving there was hope yet, but i wanted to see if there was any free ware that could do the job before i paid to register it. finally found a program called testdisk. this is possibly one of the best pieces of free ware i have seen. it recovered everything on the drive in less than 1 minute and was completely free. thanks for your help guys.

[SuperSparks]

Here's a link to it:

TestDisk