Hello fellow forumites, calling on some computer advice here please.

Recently, my external USB hard disk will become semi-mounted in Vista Familiale Premium but I can't access any of the data on it (explorer.exe hangs) and I can't shut down my computer until I physically pull out the disk from the USB port. I get the message in the task bar to tell me that all the drivers have been properly loaded and that the disk is mounted.

I used Acronis Disk Director to manage my partitions and that can see the file system, label etc. (unlike explorer) but when it tries to lock the partition to run a chkdsk it hangs. I've tried a command line Chkdsk too and that's crashed with 0% complete.

Normally the blue light is on constantly on the front of the HD case but it intermittently flashes now. All of the above operations have been run with Admin privs.

I've tried everything I can think of but to no avail. I really don't want to lose the data on this disk! Any ideas?

Thanks.

Just incase anyone does reply to this, I've sorted it.

(Ended up booting in safemode, doing a format and am now using a disk recovery utility to see if I can get anything off the disk. Fortunately, if I can't get it off that disk it looks like the files could be rescued from my main disk).

Well done - glad you seem to have sorted it out.

For future reference you could try out some of the 'live CD' versions of Linux that you can download free. If you put them in your computer and then boot it you can run Linux entirely from the CD and use it to access the data on your HDD or other drives. They make very good rescue discs. I like Mepis myself but there are others - they are not difficult to use although you should try them first before an emergency arises!

That's a very good idea, wouldn't have thought of it. I used to dual boot Redhat a long long time ago, but I've lost touch with the whole Linux thing for the moment. Everyone seems to be talking about Ubuntu. Thanks for your reply

Running data recovery is bringing up some interesting results - it's seeming that this disk may have been used before me, which is weird considering it came in a sealed pack...

My current project is getting Leopard working on a Dell Inspiron. That's proving interesting, héll of a lot of patching and stuff going on there!

(Apparently you can't say ###### these days).