recovering an "unreadable" NTFS partition on an external HDD?

[zarnold]

I have a 250 gb external drive that will not mount in mac os (using macFUSE) or in windows. It is ntfs formatted, and I’m looking for decent freeware or just a simple way to get my data back/get the disk to work again.

(under winxp I get the message that the directory is “corrupted and unreadable”)

Also – a google search only returns several pages of shareware / demos – I’m hoping there’s an easier fix than that.

I have used tools such as testdisk which recognize that the hard drive is formatted in NTFS, but for some reason neither windows explorer nor the logical disk manager can recognize the filesystem (LDM correctly returns the disk size / allocation of partitions).

Before I format the disk and start anew, I would like to make sure I can't fix this problem and at least recover the data on the disk.

Thanks a lot - zarnold

 

[silent-circuit]

I've used GetDataBack, but it's a shareware app and you need to pay to get it to do anything useful.. and if I remember right it's pricey. All that said, it /did/ work.

 

[zarnold]

ok, I'll give that a try

Thanks!

 

[SpaceHonkey]

Spinrite maybe?