Not sure I'm going about this right...

[cymbalzzz]

Like Zen1969, I, too, am impressed by the support here! Thank you for helping us!!

XP SP2, I have a WD MyBook 500GB external drive USB, NTFS, two partitions G: (roughly 400 GB) and I: (roughly 100 mb). My problems seemed to occur after inadvertently installing a demo version of Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 to the I: drive and then subsequently trying to delete it. At that point I began having $Mft errors.

PartitionMagic 8.0 sees the drive and its G: and I: partitions and used and unused space but cannot access them, giving Error #11117. The Check Partition option in PM gives Error #993 - Partition contains open files. Using the Operating System Check Utility

Will the Recovery Console fix this?

RMF says it is "Reading G" and "Reading I", but then they come up as drives 0 and 1 ?? I'm afraid to do more damage when I believe all my data is there and just under a corrupted MBR or partition table? I'm not sure which search to invoke in RMF to assure success.

I am unsure as to how to take the drive and hook it directly to the computer as a slave drive (as I had read in some other posts). Would I be better taking this to a professional for them to do just that, or is that unnecessary?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. And I thank you in advance for your assistance.

[GDH]

You should be able to get your data back. Having the drive connected via your USB is fine.

When you run Recover My Files (download from www.recovermyfiles.com) the first search you should try is a "Fast Format Recover".

In the drive selection window, you need to search the "physical drive". A physical drive is an actual piece of hardware (i.e. a hard drive) installed in your computer - as apposed to a "logical drive" (i.e. a drive letter - you can have more than one logical drive on a physical drive).

Searching the physical drive allows Recover My Files to treat the hard drive as one big chunk of raw data, and gives it the best chance to find all files.

A Fast Format Recover is Fast (should take less than 40 minutes) which is why you should try this first. It does not always work, so depending on the results, you may like to follow this up with a Complete Format Recover. Again, search the physical drive, and search only for the default selected file types.

At the end of both the searches, Recover My Files will try to rebuild the old file system and display the results in Folder View of the results screen. You should be able to click on the files found and preview their content in the results screen. If you can see your files, then you can purchase a product activation key and save the files back to your C: drive. Once you are sure you have all your important files (perhaps you should also make a backup of the backup), then in you case it is probably best to reformat the drive and start over.

[cymbalzzz]

Thank you so much, Graham, for your quick response! I am going to attempt to proceed exactly as you have instructed and, hopefully, will be successful

Again, I appreciate your help tremendously. I will report back with my findings/questions/etc.

Sara

[cymbalzzz]

The fast format seemed to do nothing. Everything just seemed to freeze up.

I am now doing the Full Format Recover. It has run for 10 hours and says 2200 of 976773168. 0 Files found and 0 O/S System files found. Can this be right? I figure at this pace, it will be roughly 506 years before it finishes?

I must not be doing something right.

[GDH]

It does not sound like Recover My Files is able to access the drive.

Did you select the physical drive to search?
Is the drive light flashing?
Can you hear the drive spinning?

What are the results now, have the Files Found and OS Items found numbers changed?