Welcome to the nightmare:
With the intention of ripping some Chinese music CDs that I received for Christmas I decided to activate Asian language support in Windows XP. Without Asian language support, iTunes wasn't able to tag the files correctly using proper Chinese characters.
Imagine my surprise when after the installation and reboot, my external Maxtor USB-Connected FAT32 HDD would suddenly no longer be accessible. In fact, now if I go to "Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management", while the drive is listed (after a slight delay) and has the same drive letter it used to, the "File System" is listed as blank (as opposed to FAT32), free space is listed as 100% (when it was actually about 90% full) and the volume label is blank (whereas it used to be labelled "EXTERNAL"). If I try to access the drive from Windows Explorer, the system appears to hang as it attempts to read the drive. There is no way, Windows accidentally formatted my drive, so I assume my files must still be there, although inacessible due to Windows not being able to make any sense of the file system on the drive. I've had the drive for several years already and never had any problems with it when connected to any system. The odds of it failing physically at the precise moment I decided to activate Asian language support seem rather small, so I am truly puzzled as to what is causing the problem. My other two drives are internal NTFS formatted SATA Seagate Barracudas.
Other relevants specs of my system:
Computer: Shuttle XPC SB61G2V3
http://eu.shuttle.com/archive/en/sb61g2_images.htmOS: Windows XP Professional Version 2002 (Service Pack 2)
Problem Drive: Maxtor OneTouch 250GB External USB/Firewire HDD (Currently connected via USB 2.0)
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.5d2b41d3cef51dfe29dd10a191346068/?channelpath=/en_us/Support/Product%20Support/External%20Storage/OneTouch%20Family/Maxtor%20OneTouch%20FireWire%20and%20USBAnd this is what I am seeing in "Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management" when the drive is connected and turned on:
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Volume: (F:)
Layout: Partition
Type: Basic
File System:
Status: Healthy (Active)
Capacity: 233.76 GB
Free Space: 233.76 GB
% Free: 100%
Fault Tolerance: No
Overhead: 0%
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I had about 200GBs of data on this drive, and would greatly appreciate any advice on how to access it and/or recover my files, etc. Major kudos, not to mention serious karma points, to anyone willing and able to help me out here.
Many thanks,
Christiaan Stange
