Crap help me save my hard drive!

[eflat]

I have a Maxtor hard drive that I have been using in a USB 2.0 controller and I can't access.

It does recognize it. If I go to manage under My Computer it has the drive there and says it needs to be initialized. However it won't let me initialize it.

Then I tried taking the drive out and plugging it into the PATA port and it was recognized as an unallocated device and it seemed my only option was to format.

Can you think of any ways to get this thing to work? Somehow it became my only backup and I have years of old photos on there that are really special.

 

[charlie21]

Sounds like your partition got fragged. I've used PhotoRec and GetDataBack successfully to get data off drives in this situation. Good luck.

 

[Jiggz]

I used to have the same problem and most of the time the only thing I need to do is to fix the MBR. Try diagnosing the hdd with Maxblast and see if it can fix the mbr or partition table. Do not format or zero the hdd unless you want to delete all files!