PC hardware forum: External Hard Disk Problem

Start by running a checkdisk on it -- it's possible that you've got bad sectors, and if anything can fix it, checkdisk is your best (free) chance.

Go to Start, select Run, and type in this:

chkdsk f: /r

The /r tells it to check the entire drive for physical problems, and try to recover any data it can. This can salvage a surprising number of bad situations, but it's not a cure-all.

Don't be surprised if you end up with a ton of files moved to the root directory with weird names -- if there's data corruption, that's normal behavior. You might be able to recover data out of those files, particuarly if they're word processing files, but often they are just fragments of the original and aren't useful.

Good luck!

I recentily had a similar frustration.

i was unziping rar archives though, and ones they got to extraction certain files it would stop and an error would come up along the lines of what your getting but it said something about 'filename to long' and i later learned that by filename it ment the whole thing like d:/dir/dir/dir/dir/dir/dir/dir/, all i did was extract the rars directing to the d:/ and it all went fine. Then you just cut all the directorys down and cut and past it where you want the files to go.

when i came over this, i thought id have to find recovery software and leave it running for a day or two.