Can anyone pls help me?

I have a 500 GB external HDD from Maxtor...its only 2 months old and it asks me 2 format it all the time or now it says i cant read cause it is corrrupted and unreadable. What can I do to fix this since i live very far away from the shop that I bought it from.

thx a lot for the help!

Maybe you can try tools like HDD regenerator or spinrite to try to get the drive into working condition again?

A little more info would be useful for a relevant reply.

-has it ever been working correctly ?

-is it partitioned ?

-what OS (and Service Pack level) are you using to read it ?

-do you have important data on it

-have you formatted it ? before or after you got the message ? what file system ?

Thx for ur replies. and to answer ur questions ponch here is some info:

- yeah it has been working good for like 3 weeks now! before that sometimes it asked me 2 format it just out of te blue. i didnt do it, just restarted my pc a few times and then it worked again!!

- no its not partitioned

- i got xp home edition with service pack 2

- well have music on it which in my books is really important and some pics

- no i havent formated it!

A few hours after i posted the question it worked again..... but i think in a few days it will give the same s*** again! Just wondering if its maybe my fault or if that hard drive has problems with more people then just me! :?

thx for replies!

- no its not partitioned

- well have music on it which in my books is really important and some pics

This is impossible, if you have some data on it, it must be partitioned and formated.

Edited June 20, 200917 yr by leon

Just to clear hopefully a possible misunderstanding.

ANY HD needs to be partitioned (i.e. have a MBR and a partition table in it's first sector)

it is possible however to create just one single partition extending over the entire hard disk capacity

So I guess that the question was. "is it partitioned in several partitions/volumes?

And the answer was: "No it is just a big partition spanning over the entire drive."

For the record, and though noone posed the question, IMHO having a single huge partition spanning over the entire drive is the LEAST advised way to have a disk partitioned as ANY activity on it (like defragging, cloning, recovering from possible failures, etc., etc.) is likely to either take more time or make things more difficult when compared to having a number of "decently sized" volumes/partitions.

jaclaz