Maxtor Personal 3100 series =external hard drive= i/o error

I have a Maxtor Personal 3100 80 gig ext. hard drive that has tones of goodies on it. I left for vacation and shut everything down to avoid any problems. Jokes on me. When I returned and rebooted everything the Maxtor ext. drive slowly and methodically displays an i/o error. Drive isn't accessible or doesn't exsist. HMMM. I hope someone out there has a cure for this.
Thanks,

Jim

Does windows still give it a drive letter? Have you tried a different USB port? Have you looked for errors in the event viewer or conflicts in the device manager?

Windows soes assign a drive letter. I have tried all usb ports. The device manager states that the drive is enabled and working properly. However after a long wait period after right clicking and waiting for the properties box to open the properties box shows 0 used drive space and indictes that the file format is RAW. Wierd. I haven't checked the events viewer as of yet. I will do so now.

Thanks,

Jim

I just checked the events viewer and found nothing that stands out and grabs me. However I went into computer management and looked at the drives. It tells me the drive is letter H: and that it is online, healthy, and empty, however it gives no file system. It was formated to fat32 when I installed it.

you should backup your data first before doing experimentation on how to regain your ext drive back. you can do it by using a recovery software which read data from harddrive with corrupted partition, or even reformatted. should you wish, i can email you an appz which will do the recovery.

That would be great! I have tried other applications to do this but they get the same results-drive unavailible i/o error.
I'm willing to try anything right now.

Thanks,

Jim