[doug62]

About 11 months ago I added an external LaCie Hard Drive 1TB to my system to be able to back up my C drive and to store my music files on (copy my cd collection). I partitioned into two drives J for the backup and M for the music. Over the past several months I have downloaded over 800 cd's to the M drive and it worked fine until recently where it showed as corrupted. I called LaCie and they advised that the hardware is probably ok as the computer still sees the J drive and associated volume. When I "explore" the computer it sees the M drive but there is no data (no total size or free space showing). When you click on it (the M drive) it gives the message that it is unavailable and corrupted. Lacie advised formatting the drive after attempting to recover the data (which they think is still there just corrupted). I suppose I could just format the drive and re-copy all the cd's but that took forever the first time, so I would like to try and recover them before I resort to that.

The error message reads "M is not accessable. The paremeter is incorrect" But, when I click the J partition of the same drive it shows the volume and available volume as normal. The music files were recorded using dbPowerAmp and saved in FLAC format. I also had a folder in M for converted files where I converted the FLAC files to Apple Lossless for use on my iPod. Again, this whole thing worked fine for 10 months (recording the cd's, being able to convert them to the Apple format, importing them into iTunes or just playing the FLAC files I had recorded, etc...). My machine is about 2 years old, and HP Pavilion a6142n running Vista.

Does anyone have any suggestions on a relatively inexpensive software package that will recover corrupted files from an external hard drive? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[computerguy1990]

You can try a Linux Live cd and plug the Ext HDD into the computer running the live CD and see if linux can get at them seems to be working great for me. Sounds more like your J: drive lost its partition bits and thats why its not working and why your M: drive still is. If the hard drive itself was starting to go bad I would think it would affect both partitons as a partition is just a logical split of the drive.