[gregbradley]

I was using an external hard disk for storing some astro data.

I plugged it into my Vista computer to read some files. It never got there.

Now when I plug it back into my Win 7 laptop I get the drive detected but I can't access files. I get corrupted file or directory error message.

Any suggestion on what to do?

It also asks to format the drive.

On my observatory computer one of the hard disks did something similar about 4 months ago. If I click on that hard disk I get an error saying the disk is not formatted and asks if I want to format it now? (I don't).

Hard disks seem very flimsy and unreliable these days. They have massive capacity but seem to fail very easily.

Any suggestions?

Greg.