External Hard Drive Maxtor Reading/recognizing

[asedesigns]

Hey, I have a maxtor 150 gig hard drive. Its running on xp system with 1gig ram so pretty decent. I was working on something and then the system crashed so i restarted. Then it did a system check on E drive (the external hard drive)

The drive was normally called E: EXTERNAL DRIVE when I restarted the system was starting up slow at the windows start up. It was named E : local drive which was the original name. So it changed it. I tried to change the drive letter to K to see if it would pick anything up but All of a sudden I cant access my files i think its just not working well together between the drive and the system because the drive is spinning and working fine, but when I start it up its just the computer runs so slow.

Any idea what the problem is or how to fix it ? I tried from renaming the drive to restarting to other basic things, but of course I dont want to lose the files. Its really awkward though in the system drive maintainence it says that there is 150 gigs free although it cant read it well so i dont know if this is an error or it erased it. Probably an error since its not picking it up but please advise me on what to do. Im just at a loss here to get my files back.

[goldeagle2005]

Most probably, the partition table's gone corrupt. Don't try to copy/format the drive. Just boot into recovery console using the Windows CD (or use command prompt. I prefer recovery console as I feel it gives you access to powerful diagnostic tools) and run 'chkdsk /r E:' (or whatever is the external disk's drive letter). This should solve your problems. Be advised that this will take quite a lot of time for your 250 Gig drive. I suggest you leave it on over night.

[rowfastwin]

This just saved my hide...actually, a hard drive that Geek Squad had given up on and replaced (per Extended Service Contract) with a new one.....now I have the best .... a new hard drive and all my old data!

[flynismo]

Awesome! ;)