External HDD with casing not working plzzz help

[blacklisted]

i hv a normal 200GB Seagate hard disk with USB2.0+Firewire casing . For the last few days it was working fine but now it gives error: File or directory is corrupted or unreadable ..... is there any chance i can get my data back before i try n format the hard disk...plz recommend a good software for recovery

[suman2005]

Originally Posted by blacklisted

i hv a normal 200GB Seagate hard disk with USB2.0+Firewire casing . For the last few days it was working fine but now it gives error: File or directory is corrupted or unreadable ..... is there any chance i can get my data back before i try n format the hard disk...plz recommend a good software for recovery

I ran into this problem too - I attached a 160 GB HDD and after a couple of weeks I got a similar message as the one you got. After a lot of hair pulling I found that the darned external cases controller was not capable of addressing drive area beyond 127GB !! I bought a new Vantec case and this problem is now not present on the same 160GB HDD.

Here is what you can try - make a partition using XP's Disk Management at around 120GB and 2 more of 40GB each so you will have 3 partitions .... then try copy a file to the last partition which will occupy the 160 - 200 GB physical space on the HDD ..... if you get an error writing to this partition and not on the first 120Gb partition then you will know that your external case has same 127GB limitation as the one I had.

Are you using NTFS file system ? If you are using FAT32 with such a large drive I think you can run into the problem you are facing.