Hello, This is my first post on MSFN, I appreciate all of your patience ahead of time. I was opening files on my external hard drive last night, more specifically, audio and video files. There was one video file that stopped playing for unknown reasons at first, I closed my media player, reopened it, then windows said that the file was corrupted. I try to open another file, same thing. Then a balloon pop-up in the system tray said my '\secure' folder is corrupted. I believe this is a hidden system folder for the ntfs file system? Anyway, the pop-up also said to run check disk. I did so, but when I ran check disk, it said that it could not read the volume. I tried to access the drive with no luck receiving the message 'drive inaccessible.' My first question is what possibly happened? Has the ntfs file system been corrupted? I just find it hard to believe that this could happen by just opening files on my external hard drive. This incident has never happened before. I checked in disk management that the partition is still recognized by windows though, so the partition isn't deleted. I can disconnect the drive and reconnect it fine, and the Maxtor's software pops since I have the drive password protected. I have restarted my computer twice and plugged in the drive in other USB ports with no luck. Although I will try to connect the drive to another computer to see if this works. I had some recovery software, search and recover 3, but I could not 'fix' the file system. What steps should I take to recover my drive? Any good software to fix these problems? All recommendations are welcome. I want to explore my options before I take my hard drive to a data recovery company. This would be a last ditch option. Please let me know what other information you need to help diagnose the problem so better feedback can be provided. I have a Maxtor OneTouch II USB 2.0 connected to a Windows XP Pro SP3 pc. Thanks for all of the help in advance. -Charlie