Faulty Ext. Hard Drive, no access.

Hey everyone! :)

So, I recently picked up this external hard drive from a friend, who was having some issues with it. From his first description I thought I would be able to solve it myself, but it turns out the problem is way more complex and unknown to me than I had thought.

Here's what's up:

1-The Hard drive, is a standard external one connected to the PC via a standard USB cable ( One regular USB connector on the PC side and a small one, I believe they are refered to as 'mini-USB Type B' on the drive's side).

2-When connected to the PC it shows up like an internal hard drive, strangely, not with the external devices.

3-It cannot be browsed or accessed in any other way, the windows explorer will either, load -extremely- slowly, without success, OR freeze OR simply say it cannot be accessed.

4-The furthest I got in terms of interacting with it, was to uninstall and reinstall it via disk manager.

5-All other attempts fail, formatting is impossible as a right click leads to the problems described in point 3. (I tried to format after uninstalling/installing the drive, since a message came up telling me to do so, eventhough I was planning to do it anyway).

6-The drive brand is completely unknown to me, it was purchased in Hong Kong and bears the label 'Buffalo'.

Any feedback or ideas on this topic are more than welcome

Thanks in advance & looking forward to some help

Pluffi

I get following result upon launching chkdsk /R

"The type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current drive"

I can't close that window until unplugging the external drive...


ps: in case it is of importance, the cable is not faulty, I tried the drive with another cable.