Ministation 500gb full of data says it has 0bytes of data & I need to format it!

[myfunkyhat]

Hi,

I have a 500gb Ministation (HD-PC500U2/BK-EU) which was working fine (well the cable was sometimes a little temperamental, but otherwise fine) and then one day it just didn't work.  Didn't show up on my Dell Laptop (Windows Vista) - or any other computer I tried it on - PC or Mac.  For some reason now after a couple of months it shows up in the hard drives section of explorer, but when I go into properties it says it has 0 bytes of data on it and if I double click on it it comes up with a message saying: 'You need to format the disc in Drive G before you can use it.'

Does anyone know if there is anything I can do, or if it sounds like it's fried itself somehow?  I took extra good care of it, didn't ever drop it or such, it was working one evening, but not the next morning!

Any advice appreciated.  Many thanks, Jamie

[davo]

Corrupt partition table, you would need to look into data recovery options. Why dont you have a backup?

[myfunkyhat]

Hi Davo, thanks for your reply, really appreciate you letting me know, as I didn't really know what it was.

Annoyingly a couple of days before it decided to do a swan dive, I had taken everything off of my laptop to upgrade to Windows 7, otherwise all the important stuff would have been on my laptop as well.  A good amount of it is backed up on DVDs, but a few thousand miles away in an attic! 

I thought it was worth seeing if anyone had a solution as a last ditched attempt before getting my Dad to have to find and sort the DVDs, as data recovery options are pretty non-exsitant in the Mexican Carribean!

Many thanks, Jamie