Help! Difficult External HDD Problem

[roadsweeper]

Hi all

I have a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB External USB HHD. The HDD has played up in the past but I was able to fix the problem by repairing the partition table. A few months have passed and I now get the wildly informative error message, "E: not accessible. Parameter is incorrect."

I have tried rebuilding the MBR, scanning the files structure and indexes for errors and checking the partition tables. None of the above have worked.

I can still access my data using various recovery tools I have, but I want to avoid this laborious process (for which I'll need to get another unit capable of storing 300GB) and just repair the drive if possible. Any ideas?

Cheers.

roadie.

[Plotloss]

Was the disk originally initialised with XP?

[roadsweeper]

Plotloss said:

Was the disk originally initialised with XP?

Yes. I can still see the HDD in Explorer and under Disk Management (where it shows as Active and Healthy).

Additional Info: The HDD properties were showing it as being 0 bytes in size - I may have fixed this but am still waiting for it to register as it takes forever now.

[Plotloss]

Right, things I reckon it could be.

Hosed FAT (chkdsk /f will show it as knackered but wont fix it I would wager)

Maxblast software problem, ideally post 3.6

I think if you want it working properly you are going to have start fiddling under the covers...

[roadsweeper]

Plotloss said:

Right, things I reckon it could be. Hosed FAT (chkdsk /f will show it as knackered but wont fix it I would wager) Maxblast software problem, ideally post 3.6 I think if you want it working properly you are going to have start fiddling under the covers...

The drive is formatted as NTFS. chkdsk won't run under A Windows DOS prompt because it can't lock the HDD. I scheduled a scan on reboot and that ran through OK.

I'll take a look at Maxblast - thanks.