Ok, I'll keep trying. Do you really think that connecting this drive directly to the computer will work?

If I do, among the free alternatives, what programs would you suggest?

Siedog, were you ever able to fix your External HD and what did you do? I'm having the same issue.

I have a Maxtor One Touch II 300gb External Hard Drive. One day, I just couldn't access some of my folders anymore (especially the large ones with music, movies, etc.). Checkdisk, defrag, etc. all freeze/fail. Some of the folders are still accessible, but the really big ones aren't.

Thanks in advance for your help!

I still have yet to fix this issue. I think the drive is just toast. suggest backing anything you can get off the drive or else risk not getting anything back at all.

One other suggestion which I haven't tried yet was to get another system and hook up the drive as a slave directly to the motherboard and see what happens. If you do, tell me how it went so if I do that myself I would know kinda what to expect.

good luck.

I tried hooking up my External HD to my laptop, but ended up messing up my laptop's internal HD's partition. Then I tried hooking my External HD up to a desktop and using software from Kroll On Track to recover/repair the drive. No dice.

So I had two drives that were toast, an External HD and a laptop's internal HD.

I gave up and called a few data recovery places. Kroll quoted me a really wide range ($400-$1800). I found another place that I used that was able to recover all of my data on both my External HD and my laptop's internal drive for a very reasonable amount. They shipped me both drives today so I will let you know how things go. I got Dell to send me a replacement hard drive as well so I can check out the data. Everything with this company has been great so far so I am hopeful that they recovered everything I need.