Big Problems ~ Photography help storage^^

[baboo]

I have not used Maxtor One Touch before, but I am assuming it's no different than other USB hard drives on the market. Depending on how important the data is to you (ie., how much money and/or time you want to spend to fix it), there are couple things you can try:

Option A: free, time consuming (your time)
1. Open up the plastic/metal "shell" of that One Touch and take the hard drive out carefully and hook it up to a PC as an internal hard drive. You should have some empty space already on this PC that's larger than the size of your Maxtor or the size of the data you want to recover.

2. If the PC can see the hard drive at boot/BIOS, you have some chance of recovering the data. Use hard drive recovery tools to (try)recover the data. A tool set I use all the time is on a boot CD that you can *find* on the internet, it's called "Hiren's Boot CD." I don't have a link handy but it's easily downloadable after some searching. It has a plenty of hard drive recovery tools and one hard drive utility that can even recover from physical errors (I have used it and it actually worked, to some degree. I was very surprised.)

3. Copy over whatever you can save to the empty space on the PC and either return/exchange your One Touch drive. You might want to wipe it clean if you have confidential data on it. I don't know if the process of opening the One Touch case will destroy and warranty stickers or not...

4. If you can't see the hard drive in BIOS/boot, see option B below.

Option B: expensive, can be time consuming (someone else's time)
1. find a reputable hard drive recovery company and send them your hard drive for a diagnose. This step usually costs USD$:200 and up.

2. They will let you know if it's recoverable and will even show you the list of files. Of course the next step will be expensive, additional to that 200+ spent.

3. Good luck.