LaCie external HD partitioned/2, and one of the partitions appears without format?

External hard drives are so failure-prone they aren’t good for backing up anything you really need to keep. Use them for videos or music, but don’t put your critical data there.

However, to answer your question, just try

CHKDSK Q: /R

assuming Q: is the letter assigned to the faulty partition. If that doesn’t work, I can’t think of too many off-the-shelf utilities that would help.

I believe that software that can recover information from hard disks that are damaged is very expensive. Infact its probably on a par with the software that forensic scientists use to bust paedos.

Though I do believe that there are computer repairs stores that you can bring your drive to that can recover information.

Thnks @IchtheosaurusRex i’ve really forgotten command line… soon as i typed it, the DOS windows opened and recognized the volume label. just like that. And while it was running the tasks i realized that i should have tryed to copy the files in DOS, it would have been easier. but, the disk went back to normal, so I moved back the largest foldersto my computer and plan to to a complete format and check of the unit later. meanwhile, i must check the files to see if anything is damaged… i hope not. Thanks again!
@LeotCol I searched for such software, but the most I’ve found recovers erased data from hard disks; and the ones that you refer to are expensive and specific, and, surely, hard to get. Now, the question is: what is more secure? cd disks? dvd disks? blue rays disks? they can scratch. a hard drive external rack? a cousin have a pair, i’ll check with him. but that solution is a rack with detachable cases in a desktop pc… i have a notebook. maybe one of these should be better: http://tinyurl.com/c7uf22

@manuel_alarcon , leave a nickel in the tray and tell your friends about me.

From personal experience, the best backup medium is a second internal HDD. This is not an easily portable solution, but you get the reliability. CDs and DVDs are hit-miss. I’ve burned so many that I’ve ended up throwing out. I’ve had good luck with a Sony DVD burner, but I still would not trust it with anything essential. You might also consider USB flash drives. You can get a 4G drive for about 10 bucks. Buy a pocketful of them and you can back up a lot of data.