500gig Hard drive failure?

I have a Seagate 500gig Freeagent external hard drive, only about 4 months old, with a 146gig fat32 partition and a 319gig NTFS partition.

The other day I unplugged it from the usb port on my computer (both partitions were working fine), used it on my ps3 (fat32 partition), and when I plugged it back into my computer the contents of the NTFS partition seemed to have dissapeared, although there is 118gigs of space being taken up on the partition. Fat32 partition works fine.

It seems like my files are still on the NTFS partition but they don't show up when I open the drive. Any ideas on how I could recover them? I've tried running checkdisk but it says it has to be run after my computer restarts, and when I restart it, it doesn't seem to run for some reason.

 

have you tried doing a scandisk (make sure you check the box to fix errors)? Scandisk is very similar to chkdsk and you can run it from within windows.

 

I was able to run scandisk, first I chose to "automatically fix file system errors," then I did "scan for and attempt to recovery of bad sectors."

Now I'm able to open the drive and see the contents but after a few seconds of viewing the contents of the drive, I get an error that says "windows explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close." Thoughts? Thanks all.

 

For future reference, use a separate hard drive for the PS3 - it's so much simpler that way, and avoids issues like these.
As for the crash, I usually only see that if the directory structure of a drive is completely ruined. If you still have problems with the drive, your best bet is to reformat the NTFS partition and start over.