[TheMamba]

Originally Posted by CTU2fan

OK, 2 things I've learned...1, back up your shows on data discs, and 2, when you go to Dublin to see U2, don't leave your firewire drive on because if it overheats, you're screwed Anyway, I'm hoping I can salvage the data and/or the drive. It's a LaCie firewire drive, 250gb...pretty sure the actual drive inside the case is a Maxtor drive. I'm running XP, SP2. Windows says I need to format the drive when I try to access it. Mechanically, I'm 99% sure the drive is sound; it seems to spin OK etc, so the usual freeze/strike/shake suggestions really don't apply here. I'm wondering how I can access the drive without formatting it & thus losing 300+ shows. Any help would be appreciated, either how to get around the problem or where to send it to recover the data.

Check out Maxtor's (or LaCie) to see if they have any recovery utilities OR if they can offer any technical assistance.

It may be worthwhile to have your replacement hard drive ready just in case you CAN recover the data on the Maxtor drive - you'll want to be able to get it the hell off right away.

Ted's got some good ideas on data recovery too. All in all though, most of the data recovery stuff is hit or miss and there are no hard set rules that things will work.

I feel your pain - my main hard drive just started throwing off bad sectors and studdering my machine. Luckily this past weekend I had burned a bunch of shows to archive disks.