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Greg,
What size is the external hard disk? Why I ask, is that usually the first thing we do for data recovery is to make an image of the disk. This is generally done via Linux - to make a block copy of the disk to an image file.
Is the data on the disk very critical or important? I.e. do you have any copy of it, hence the need to recover the files.
If you are anywhere near Dundas, I can help you to recover your data. The process that I would use is as follows:
1. Connect the external disk to a workstation with a large disk.
2. Boot from Linux and make a copy of the external disk - i.e. using dd
3. Once the copy is done, we can try to use Linux to access the disk - usually as people have already indicated, Linux is quite tolerant of errors that Windows just throws up its hands on.
4. If accessible, the data can be copied onto the workstation disk.
Once we know we have a backup of the disk, we can then look at why the disk is not accessible from Windows - or we can work on the disk image to recover data - this is where Linux is good, because the disk image can also be mounted as a read-only file system.
I would also run diagnostics on the disk - usually available from the manufacturer. I have had a fair bit of experience in recovering data from disks, even from servers remotely in Belgium and in China.
If you have a spare machine to try this on, I can give you some idea of how to use a Linux such as Knoppix to get started.
-John
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