BleepingComputer.com: External Hard drive not working properly

Hi there, wondering and hoping you can help. My son has a 500 gig external hard drive that he keeps his life on. He has Vista on his computer though all the error messages I am going to post are from my Vaio Laptop with XP. According to my son, he pulled the USB plug without "ejecting" the drive an now it won't read the drive. More specifically, this is what happens. (all on my computer)

1. When you plug in the drive it shows up in the "My Computer" Screen as the F: drive. However, it does not show the volume name and when you click on it, "My Computer" initially freezes, and then when it starts running I get a pop up saying "the request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

2. If I go to the device manager, I get two hard drives shown - in both cases it says the device is working properly.

3. If I go to disk management, I can see the drive, and it says it is healthy, but, it shows it as empty (465.75 gig available)

4. If I go to the command prompt and try to switch to the F: drive, it says, "the request could not be performed because of an I/O error.

5. However, if I type chkdsk F:/F it seems to work. However not consistantly. The first time I did it it seemed to repair everything and the disk worked for about 1/2 an hour. The next few times it wouldn't let me, but, last might it started again. For quite some time it would post "correcting error in index $130 from file 10948 (where the file number changed)

6. Now, (and for the last 10 hours or so) it keeps trying to recover orphan files but then says there is not enough room. (BTW I believe the drive is only 1/2 full. I've attached a screen shot to show you what I see - though again, the directory file number keeps increasing.

I don't want the orphan files as they seem to be from deleted programs or content (mostly movies/MP3 files etc)

We have bought a new external drive, so, the hope is not to fix this but, to get it running long enough to transfer the data.

BTW - I have two other external hard drives - both have the wider ribbon connection (SATA? IDE? am I wrong with those acronyms?) My son's drive will not plug into those cases so, must be the "other" kind. - if that makes sense

thanks in advance for your help
JP
screen shot

<<If I go to disk management, I can see the drive, and it says it is healthy, but, it shows it as empty (465.75 gig available)>>

My guess would be that the file system is corrupt/damaged...I would try a couple of data-recovery programs to see if they detect a partition and file system.

Partition Find and Mount — free partition recovery software - http://findandmount.com/

Recovery Software, Partition Table Doctor - http://www.ptdd.com/

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File Recovery - Home - http://www.recuva.com/

Louis

Quick update - after about 30 hours, it finished recovering files and started working. Got most of what we need off the drive and will be trying the aforementioned data recovery for the rest. Thanks for your reply Louis, I appreciate it.

Nice work on your part .

Those file-recovery programs are slow...but they are wonderful when they can do the job.

Louis