This drive has (had?) about 500GB of RAW imagery on it - I am a photographer, and there are no other High Resolution copies of this imagery, so to be able to recover them would be great.
I have been using it attached to a P.C. running Windows XP Home Edition with SP3. Anti-viral software is AVG, and antmalwarebytes is also running on the p.c.now.

A few days ago, Picasa started showing corrupted images and had difficulties in accessing the drive.
I ran chkdsk on the drive. Corrupted files and bad sectors came up. Then whenever I clicked on its drive letter within Windows it reported that it required to be formatted. Windows was unable to format the drive.

I used Seagate's diagnostic tools to assess the condition of the drive, using both the short and long tests. It passed both of those, which would indicate corrupted files boot sector issues or ?

When it is attached to the p.c. the drive letter comes up, but nothing else, and it indicates that it requires to be formatted.
IF Quick Format is used, would the data be recoverable using Data Recovery tools? How would I go about doing this? Presently it is impossible to reload the OneTouch4 software onto it, which came, pre-installed, as it indicates that it requires to be formatted...

Hi
If your data really valuable to you, then send it to a pro near you.
There's alot of members in this forum in europe and UK.

I think it's a simple logical data recovery job and any pro will do this job with reasonable price.

If you mess with your drive maybe the charge will be double or higher.

Good luck

Please don't format your drive, or write on it with CHKDSK, or any other repair tool. Instead I recommend that you clone your drive and then work on the clone.