External Hard Drive Failure

[Matty]

I have a 500 gigabit external USB Drive as us a backup to my system. The other day all of a sudden I could not read the drive. It show in My Computer but when I tried to read it said the directory was corrupted please try again. Right before this happened I received a message that there was a write failure to the disk. This also seemed to coincide with just when I had hooked up a brand new I touch.

Is there any way I can be able to access the data, because at the same time I discovered that for some reason virtually my entire music library had been wiped out on my hard drive for another reason I cannot comprehend. (I was able to retrieve what was on my other Ipod but nothing else.

I have a dell 2400 with windows XP and 1 gig of memory,

The failed drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 Ultra
(even thought the label says 300 gig it is 500)

[zep516]

You could try an pull the drive out of the enclosure and plug it in to your IDE cable internally see if you get any results that way.