Seagate ext. drive troubles

I have this Seagte 200 gig ext hard drive . So the trouble I am having is this....it doesnt seem to werk anymore. The drive apparently needs to be formated...and well I have all my music n movies n well other stuff backed up in there. My question is.. is there any way to salvage all the info that is in my hard drive without formatting it? Or is there no way around it...do i have to come to the utter conclusion that all my werk is lost? please someone let me know A.S.A.P
thank you.

 

What does the system say when you try to access the drive? What O/S are you using...i.e win98, ME, win2000, XP etc?

Did you do anything that might have affected the BIOS settings?

Give us more info.

Scorp.

 

I beleive it started after I accidently pulled the usb plug out of the mac without draggin the seagate drive icon to the trash..ever since then it has not werked on either my mac or windows xp. When i tried pluggin it back in my mac it said that the disk could not be read by this computer, somethign liek that. And when i plug it into my windows xp comp n try to open it it says it needs to be formatted..

 

Well, you might be able to open it in dos, but I don't know the commands etc. I'm sure someone will come along to help in that matter. Is the drive at least recognised by windows...i.e, given a drive letter?

If all else fails, THIS PROGRAM will enable you to recover the data from the disk. It's slow, but it's very good, and it's FREE! You will need another drive to save the data to however, so you will probably need to buy one, unless you have room on the current drive. Install the program on the system drive of a machine, not the failed drive (in this case, you can't anyway). I'm not sure if it will recover mac files or not.

Scorp.

 

have you tried running chkdsk on the drive? That is pretty much always the place to start.

 

Oh, I just reread the thread.

You have this drive on a Mac.

The problem you describe sounds to me like a damaged filesystem. You need to use the Mac filesystem repair tools to fix it. In Windows that is chkdsk. In linux it would be fsck (among others). I don't know what the Mac file system checker is called, but that is where you start.

You might try fsck...in Linux that invokes other utilities...maybe in Mac it does the same thing.