maxtor external hard drive stopped working

I'm using Windows 7 Home Premium on a laptop with a Maxtor 320 GB external hard drive that I use for a back up, everything worked fine 2 days ago, this morning when I plug in the external hard drive my computer is telling me that the drive needs to be formatted before I can use it, when I try to open the drive in My Computer it tells me the "file or directory is corrupted or unreadable" I used Restore and that didn't fix anything, I'm a beginner and I'm lost trying to fix this problem, any ideas or suggestions will be appreciated - thanks

Robert

rolemac, Welcome to SF. Please right click on drive and select properties and then tools select error - checking and tell us what it finds.

thanks for the quick reply - it says "windows cannot check the disk, the disk cannot be accessed"

I'm worried for you and your drive. Let's see if others have something to try but it sounds or doesn't sound good. Likely the drive died. I would call Maxtor and speak with them about things you can try to diagnose the issue!

Man I totally understand and having it professionally retrieved is big bucks. Wait and see if others hit this post and offer a suggestion ! I'll check in from time to time. Cheers

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rolemac said:

thanks again, I'd hate to lose what's on there, it'd be nice if I could find a solution​

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You won't lose your stuff if that is your backup drive and you used it properly.
A backup is a copy of what you have stored somewhere else. If you have stuff that is stored solely on the Maxtor External, then it isn't a proper backup. That would mean you are using it as a storage drive and not as a backup drive.

I have 14 drives attached to my machine, 1 of them is the OS drive, and 11 of them are storage drives and 2 are backup drives.