BleepingComputer.com: External Hard Drive Not Found

(I am using a Dell Inspiron 6000 - 1.5 G HD, 1.0 G RAM, Windows XP SP2)

To make a long story short - Maxtor One Touch 4 external hard drive was working fine, but stopped doing automatic backups (? weeks ago). Up that point it had been working fine. I upgraded to Windows SP3 and almost immediately started having issues with connecting to the Internet (via IE7). On April 1st, things really went awry. I could not connect to the internet, restore points disappeared, could not access or download any "fixes". I was running free AVG and a scan, found nothing. I ran Malwarebytes' Anti-malware, Spybot S&D, CCleaner, and even installed the paid version of PC Tools Spyware Doctor and Registry Mechanic. In these scans, the Virtumonde virus was identified. By the behavior, it was almost as though I had been infected with Virtumonde and a Conficker variant. I have run the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool, and used another Conficker removal tool. I have managed to disinfect and clean both my desktop and laptop (unfortunately my flash drives were infected as well but I was able to scan them, disinfect them with Flash Disinfector (which disables the autorun). When I first attempted to move my EHD to my laptop to see if it was a true hardware failure or virus, the device was detected, installed and then immediately locked up, not allowing me to see neither the contents of the drive, nor did it ever show the device under Disk Management. It does not show up anywhere. I have researched this and find many posts in various forums for these drives not showing up, but none of them seem to have started the way mine did. I am at a loss of how to restore this external hard drive. It has my most precious photos, videos, and music stored. (By the way, in the process, I ran the HiJack This log, but never did anything with it - I was determined to get this one on my own. Now I raise the flag of defeat. Can anyone out there help me?

BTW - this my first forum post here, ever!!!!

Let's use flashdisinfector again, only this time plug the EHD in when it it prompts for it, holding the shift button down

Please download Flash_Disinfector.exe by sUBs and save it to your desktop.

• Double-click Flash_Disinfector.exe to run it and follow any prompts that may appear.
  
• The utility may ask you to insert your flash drive and/or other removable drives. Please do so and allow the utility to clean up those drives as well.
  
• Hold down the Shift key when inserting the drive until Windows detects it to keep autorun.inf from executing if it is present.
  
• Wait until it has finished scanning and then exit the program.
  
• Reboot your computer when done.

Note: As part of its routine, Flash_Disinfector will create a hidden folder named autorun.inf in each partition and every USB drive that was plugged in when you ran it. Do not delete this folder...it will help protect your drives from future infection by keeping the autorun file from being installed on the root drive and running other malicious files.

I apologize - I left out in my original post that I had already used Flash Disinfector on my EHD. However, I repeated it again and used the SHIFT key as you described, but my original run of FD had evidently already disabled autorun. (thanks for that advice anyway). I did as you instructed. When I initially restarted the PC, the drive was found and it said hardware was installed and ready to use. However, I am getting the message from the Maxtor Manager Program that the device is UNKNOWN. The drive still does not show up under DISK MANAGEMENT. This was exactly what was happening before the virus became full blown. When I plug in the device, I get the proverbial "USB device not recognized, and then a Maxtor display will pop up that says "Either the partition on the external drive is not recognized or the external drive has no partition.. Do you want to create one? FORMAT OR CANCEL. This was the same thing I was getting before I had the other issues with the virus. Please tell me I am not going to have to reformat this drive and possibly lose my data!

BTW - thanks for such a prompt response! I was not expecting an answer back that quickly! WOW!!!!

Give this a try?

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Here's a trial of a rather expensive program

If it sees the data then you might find a free alternative?

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm