External 300GB HDD issue... files gone and it asked for format

[DaveLembke]

Was wondering if anyone knew of any good tools to deal with a older 300GB Hard drive connected via USB 2.0 that while copying the data from this drive to another external drive, while working on a different system while this was happening I heard a USB disconnect sound and then when it made a reconnect sound it came up asking to format the external hard drive.

I powered down the 300GB Hard drive so that it wouldnt write any changes to this drive.

Powered the drive back on and it wants to format the drive so the file tables seem to be messed up.

Checking here to see if anyone has any tools to try safely on this drive to fix the borked file system of the drive?

I have a program called GetDataBack NTFS but its a very slow running program to recover files. Before I use this tool I figured I'd check to see if there are file system correction tools available which might be quicker to getting the data back.

[Geek-9pm]

Hard drive connected via USB 2.0

External hared drive adapters have a bad rap. Th fail rather often. But in some cases it is the external power supply, not the interface.

On thing you can try is to connect the drive directly in you desktop with power and SATA  cables. But if the drive is the older 'IDE' style, you can put in where your CD rive was, if it is an IDE type.

Or, try another external USB and power supply interface.

[DaveLembke]

Opened up the clam shell to extract the drive and connect internally. It still wants to format the drive and I refuse to do that knowing there is data on it but the table is corrupt.

Going to try this method tonight after work: http://html5.litten.com/how-to-fix-external-disk-drive-suddenly-became-raw/

Looks like PartedMagic might be able to fix the problem. When google searching the other day before posting here I didnt see this one. Changed search wording and found this, which is exactly my issue.