data recovery from external hard drive

I think a file in my Maxtor "Max Blast Plus, ver. 1.27S" is incompatible with the other files and has caused my hard drive to crash ... it won't even open. Is there a way to delete the incompatible file or a program that will recover my data? :cry

 

Hello,
Are you saying the external drive is the one that has crashed and the system drive in your computer is okay?

 

Yes !

 

What happens when you connect your external drive to your computer? You cannot access the files or windows does not see the hard drive?

 

When I connected the hard-drive to the computer, the computer registered that it was there. It would not let me open the files. There was a message that kept reappearing saying that i should run the "chkdsk." I ran the "checkdsk/F" and restarted the computer. nothing happened. The computer said that the files were unreadable/corrupted.

 

Okay, the first thing that can be done is to see if the files are available through linux, but I do not feel too good about it now that you said the computer said the files are corrupted. What does disk management say about the external drive when it is connected?

Download Puppy linux and burn the iso file with something like Imgburn. The iso has to be burned as an image, it cannot just be burned to the CD as a iso file. Burn the iso at a slow speed. After you have burned Puppy, boot from it and then connect the external hard drive.

You should be able to see the icon on the desktop represent the usb drive you just plugged in. Click once on it. Can you access any of the files. Try clicking on a text file or image file and see what puppy says.

If that fails there is a data recovery program that might help.