USB Hard Drive Help

[Leon Machado IV]

Greetings to all,

I purchased a Maxtor 80GB external drive to help support my little 10GB internal laptop drive. Recently I've found that it doesn't want to be read, and if Windows tries to read it, it locks up the system.

I've attempted the Windows default (in win2000) scan disk, which isn't doing anything for it (coming back all unreadable sectors, which doesn't make sense). I want to use ye old fashioned dos based scan disk to try to go through it, or any program that anyone can recommend. Basically Windows can't try to read it, cause that locks it up, thus the reason for DOS.

Any suggestions, feel free. I'm willing to try just about anything. Lots of important and personal data on it, along with years of FIRST stuff. Thanks.