A fairly new 200 gig external firewire hard drive was working fine in my
daughter's laptop (win xp pro) she lent it to a friend to retreive some
files and the friend got some error messages..now on my daughter's laptop
she gets "disk structure is corrupted and unreadable"

The disc shows up in "my computer", and it says it is "healthy" in disc
management. But it says that it has 100% free space (which is doesn't).. in
properties, in "my computer" it says the opposite--that it is 100% full. In
any event, it can not be accessed. She, of course, has 150 gigs of
important video on the drive for a college film project... any suggestions?
thanks

Have your tried running chkdsk /f?
"MNP" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:wPPrd.1697$(E-Mail Removed)...
> A fairly new 200 gig external firewire hard drive was working fine in my
> daughter's laptop (win xp pro) she lent it to a friend to retreive some
> files and the friend got some error messages..now on my daughter's laptop
> she gets "disk structure is corrupted and unreadable"
>
> The disc shows up in "my computer", and it says it is "healthy" in disc
> management. But it says that it has 100% free space (which is doesn't)..
in
> properties, in "my computer" it says the opposite--that it is 100% full.
In
> any event, it can not be accessed. She, of course, has 150 gigs of
> important video on the drive for a college film project... any
suggestions?
> thanks
>
>

"MNP" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:wPPrd.1697$(E-Mail Removed)...
> A fairly new 200 gig external firewire hard drive was working fine in my
> daughter's laptop (win xp pro) she lent it to a friend to retreive some
> files and the friend got some error messages..now on my daughter's laptop
> she gets "disk structure is corrupted and unreadable"
>
> The disc shows up in "my computer", and it says it is "healthy" in disc
> management. But it says that it has 100% free space (which is doesn't)..
in
> properties, in "my computer" it says the opposite--that it is 100% full.
In
> any event, it can not be accessed. She, of course, has 150 gigs of
> important video on the drive for a college film project... any
suggestions?
> thanks
>

Here are a few third-party tools that might help:
http://www.restorer2000.com/r2k.htm (to restore NTFS partitions - seems to
work well)
http://www.hddrecovery.com.au
http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz (has NTFS undelete tools too)
http://www.runtime.org/ (GetDataBack)
www.acronis.com (RecoveryExpert)

Running inbuilt tools such as chkdsk.exe might obliterate any
trace there is of the missing files.

After recovering the missing files, consider these two statements:
- If files are important then they must be backed up.
- If files are not backed up then their owner does not think that
they are important.

"Backed up" means backed up to an independet medium.