Corrupted External HD - How to fix?

We have a Maxtor 120gb external hard drive at work (USB 2.0). During the move to our new location, I think it may have been damaged (I wasn't here when they were moving it so I don't know what could have happened).

Anyway, after the move, I hooked it up, and now any time I plug it in, the computer slows to a crawl, and will never mount the drive. If I have it plugged in while booting up, the computer won't boot until I unplug it, then it immediately continues booting up.

I plugged it into my Powerbook, because you know, everything "just works" on Macs ;), and it did indeed mount fine, and I could access some of the files. But when I got to a certain section of the files (the ones we needed, of course), it would completely lockup and crash the Mac.

So, I'm wondering if there are just some corrupted files, or if the drive got dropped, and the needles have actually scratched the disks inside or something.

Are there any apps out there for Windows that I can use to repair this disk? The problem of course is that I can't even mount it, so I don't know how that's going to work. Any other ideas?

What file system is your drive formatted to? Fat32? NTFS?

You can download this (works for any ata drive):
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/?epi_menuItemID=3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068&epi_menuID=976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&epi_baseMenuID=976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software%20Downloads/ATA%20Hard%20Drives&downloadID=22

It's called PowerMax in case the link got bungled. You can search Maxtors site. All it will do really is tell you if the drive is hosed or not.

You can right-click the drive icon (if it is showing up) and Tools -> Scan for errros. It might mark the bad sectors and able you to mount it.

You can also mount your drive with your powerbook and open up a terminal and do
$fsck_msdosfs if it's a fat partition.
you can $man fsck_msdosfs for more info on that....

Sounds like it got hosed though...

It's NTFS.

Its icon is not showing up at all in My Computer. It just slows down the entire system to a crawl and never mounts.

So I can't do the mac thing if it is NTFS?

We have to have the data off of this thing... Might have to send it off to one of those data recovery services I guess...

I can't use the PowerMax thing either, 'cause it's a USB 2.0 drive, not ATA.

You can insert your windows XP disk (in recovery mode) and boot off it, then run CHDSK on it.

Your powermac should have a disc ghosting app: $dd But it is confusing as hell and you need to find the bad blocks to skip over them.

Do you have a copy of Norton Ghost? Might try copying the drive to a good disk, then seeing if you can mount it properly.

When I reboot with the drive connected, it runs a chkdsk of some sort and says one of my drives needs to be "Checked for consistency". Then it scans it, and says:

File record segment 98908 is unreadable.
File record segment 98909 is unreadable.
File record segment 98910 is unreadable.
File record segment 98911 is unreadable.

And the rest of the checks turn out ok.

It SHOULD mark those sections as unreadable and ignore them if it completes the chdsk. So you can continue using the drive to get your stuff off...

After it does that and the other checks, it just stays on that screen. It never continues to boot up or anything. I just have to turn the computer off, unplug the drive, and boot up that way.

I guess we are going to take it to Best Buy and have them look at it. I suggested a local computer repair place that is cheaper and much more well trained, but my boss seems to love making silly decisions.