Hello,
I know that this issue has been touched on before, but most of the recommended solutions don't seem to work for me.
So here's the deal: I have a 200 GB Maxtor external USB hard drive that's formatted FAT32. Normally, I have it hooked up to my Windows XP SP2 Pro laptop, but a few months ago, I hooked it up to a MacBook Pro briefly to download some files off of it. Since the hard drive is formatted FAT32 and can be read by both Windows and Macs, I didn't see a problem.
However, about halfway through the file transfers, the hard drive suddenly stopped running. When I hooked it back up to my Windows laptop, the drive icon appeared in the My Computer Window as usual. However, none of my files appeared on the drive, and the Properties window told me it was now formatted RAW with 0 bytes free and 0 bytes used.
Every solution that I've come across on the web recommends various data recovery programs, and I've tried many of them to no avail. The problem is that most of those programs don't even see the drive, and the few that do give me a "Drive not found" error message when I try to access it. I've listed below some of the applications that I've tried.
I'm very adamant about not sending this drive to a data recovery center because the drive contains files of a personal nature that I don't want anybody else seeing. I would appreciate any advice anybody could provide.
Thanks.
P.S. The MacBook Pro was on loan. I returned it the day after I tried transferring the files, and I cannot get it back.
A partial list of data recovery/partition table repair software that I've tried:
ptedit32
PartitionMagic 8.0
Partition Table Doctor 3.5
EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional 3.3.4
Smart Data Recovery
Smart Flash Recovery
Recover Data for FAT & NTFS - Desktop Recovery
GetDataBack
TestDisk
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