If you have ever lost your data on a drive and thought it was gone forever, try Get Back Data recovery software. I recently lost 70 gigs on a 2 week old 300 gig Maxtor drive. The reason for the loss is unknown. Anyway, I was told about this software and I downloaded the free trial version that will recover and display your files. You just can't copy them to a safe drive until you buy the upgrade key to unlock the copy feature. It's like them holding a glass of icewater just out of reach of someone just rescued from the desert. It only costs $69 for FAT32 and $79 for NTFS and is worth every penny to see those files again.

One important note though. If anyone uses this software, be sure to use 1394 or USB 2.0 as your connection and NOT USB 1.1. Using USB 1.1 said it would take almost two days to recover the files!! When I cancelled that and switched to a 1394 connection, uhhh, it said 3 hours to complete the recovery. That thing was really moving as it recovered and displayed the lost files. It was like giving the software a laxative it moved so much faster!

Get Back Data Recovery
www.runtime.org

hey james, i second your comment on this application.
Its prolly one of the best, if not THE best file recovery app, one thign though, is that most of the data losses occured on external drives, is simply due to windows management nuking the volume index.

Ive had 4 HDDs (all firewire.. ) which have died, but swithing to usb2, i am yet to have a drive die on me.. yet..

another issue you may have in your case would be the drive itself.. everyone ive known who has tries a maxtor drive has had issues with it..

as for me, ive had some earlier problems with Western Digital, but im yet (knock on wood) to have an issue with a seagate.. hell im runnin an ancient 6 yr old system with a 6.2gb HDD, which has NEVER failed..

Peter:
With the prolific chipsets, they'd get problems like the one you describe with windows killing the volume index.

You can flash them to fix this problem.

If your enclosure doesn't have that specific chipset then never mind.

2 were Lacie enclosures, and the cheaper ones were blue eye and some other noname one, i think it was a skymaster..

knock on wood i havent had issues since going USB2...