External hard drive and Ubuntu.
 

Hello,

I need some help in accessing data from my external hard drive.

I have an iomega external hard drive with 500 Gig space. I was using it to save my files. I used to log in Windows XP and copy many files for the last three months. Then I copied a folder from Ubuntu on to that external hard drive. It looks like the file system on the external hard drive is messed up when Ubuntu tried to copy a folder to it. Now I am not able to read the contents of the external hard drive either from Windows XP SP2 or from Ubuntu 6.06 . Both Windows XP and Ubuntu is able to detect the external hard drive. Windows is forcing me to format the external hard drive, maybe because it is not able to detect the file system.

I am not able to see the files on the external hard drive from Ubuntu either. From Ubuntu computer file browser window, the external hard drive does not appear. I was able to successfully read the external drive from Ubuntu also about ten days back. Ten days back, when I accessed the external the external hard drive successfully, I copied a folder from Ubuntu local hard drive to the external hard drive. Maybe that was a mistake. I am surprised to even think that Ubuntu can mess up the existing file system on the external hard drive.

How can I recover the data stored in the external hard drive? What would be the right forum to ask for help on recovering files from external hard drive? The iomega support person is not able to help me. The external drive is still in warranty.

Thanks and regards,
Ganesh

The Iomega drive probably has a FAT32 file system on it. I would boot Windows, open Windows Explorer, select that disk drive, click on the 'Tools' tab, and select the 'Check disk structure' option.

It is not possible for us reading this to know what went wrong to mess up your disk drive but I would suspect things like trying to copy a file that is larger than 2GB or a file that has too many characters in its name.