Maxtor 3200 100GB External Drive - Not showing up

[MPRadamacue]

Finally got the okay from my wife to purcahse a new computer - Gateway but its new and is a pretty nice machine with some of the upgrades I used.

I had a Maxtor 3200 External drive on the old (Slowly dying) computer and was using it as a backup drive. I have been trying to connect it to the new computer. It does not read at all though.

IT shows "the files is corrupted and undetecable." What is perplexing about this is that one day ago on the old computer it was fine. It is backup files but it does have some important family photos which is why I haven't tried to format it.

I am running:

Vista Home Premium
Gateway GT5426E
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2.6 GHZ
RAM 2.0 GB

Anything I can try to access this without paying for it or reformatting it

 

[rf6647]

file recovery tools

Techspot provides links to shareware and freeware for file recovery

Near the top of the welcome screen: dowloads ! file management ! recovery tools

So far I have not found anything that is totally free. I have bookmarked www.acronis.com for a 15-day free trial that claims to set up a 1-cylinder partition for storage of lost files found by it. This amounts to about 7.8MB (their estimate). Most shareware will display lost files detected by the program, but you pay to activate the recovery function. Other shareware limits the size of file recovered.