I have a Maxtor external hard drive that windows doesn't recognize the name that I named the drive nor the contents of the drive. Bought software ($200) called VirtualLab to get the data and when it runs it gets an error message "read error encountered at sector 12345 on the disk "disk 6". The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. Can anyone give me some direction. Thanks in advance.

Has you drive letter for your external Hard drive been changed from the orginal letter ?

Has you drive letter for your external Hard drive been changed from the orginal letter ?

Yes, it was originally named as "Maxtor" and windows assigned the drive letter in brackets, which would change sometimes if I added another drive, I'm pretty sure. Now it assigns a letter only, windows scans the drive on startup, but shows no files within the drive. No noises/smoke or unusual physical indication of problem.

Have you run chkdsk /f on this drive?
I'm new here-apparently the sticky about no support questions in this forum is no longer valid?

I have tried but get no results. CHK DSK/ won't acknowlede the drive. It shows up as drive N but that's it. Also tried through properties of the N drive to run error checking, but when you choose a box to run the check, nothing happens, no error msg, nothing. Ideas?

just to be sure:
In the run box, type: chkdsk /f

just to be sure:
In the run box, type: chkdsk /f

You can't select the drive (N) in run box, just the C drive. Right?

Sorry:
chkdsk /f n:

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