Hello all,

This external HD apparently has a myriad of issues dealing with how the USB/IDE interacts with Windows. I think essentially, it results in corrupted MBR and/or file partition tables. It's widely reported but it's unclear how the problem develops. ? pulling the USB plug unsafely?

Some other forums I've found:
http://www.yan-ke.com/maxtor_corruption.html
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes ... ing&page=5

Symptoms:
Windows will display the drive letter, but no info on the disk (capacity). It registers as a RAW drive. Trying to access the drive results in a "Disk is not formatted. Do you want to format?"

I know the super-experts here will just shake their heads at my foolishness, but this is what I did to it. The data was not critical, so I played with the fates and this is my "reward."

1. Followed the instructions from the first link earlier. Testdisk showed that I had 2? invalid boot partitions. Looking at testdisk's wiki, I used testdisk to rebuild the boot sector. The backup boot sector was intact, so this was copied.
2. Still was not showing disk size in Windows
3. Panicked/gave up, and ran chkdsk /f
4. Restored readability and recognition in Windows, but lost practically all the data

Questions for the experts:
1. Proper way to go at step 2? Is chkdsk like a kiss of death? I'm assuming chdsk rebuilt the MFT. Should I have rebuilt the MFT using testdisk?
2. Any way to undo what chkdsk has done?

This is a NTFS drive by the way.

Thank you for the link.

I ended up using EASEUS Disk Recovery Wizard. It recovered ~25g or so of what I think was about 40gbs I had put on there originally, though none with the original filename. For whatever reason, the largest file it can recover is 50megs, and so any files larger than that (I had a lot, mostly video files) got chopped off at that size. Better than nothing I suppose.

Now I'm just going through the numerous file001 file002 file003 etc. with a video format fixing program to salvage what's there.