hey there.... recently i had purchased simple techs 500 gb external hard disk.... apparently my pc got infected vth viruses which i feel is due to the files from the external hard disk ..vth the help of spybot security experts i removed all the affected files on my system .... .. but when i scanned the external hard disk using nod32 it din show up ne virus infections.... n some of the files in the external hard disk seems to be corrupt or unreadable....i tried running the chkdsk utility on the hard disk but it din show much change .... can u pls help me rectify it .... is there ne other option other than formatting it... ? pls help....

Hi and welcome to the WTT forums

Sorry to hear about the problems with your external hard drive and the virus issues that you say have now been overcome.

1 Formatting your external hard drive is certainly is one course of action you could try, but of course this will delete the data, so is really a last resort.
2 A data recovery laboratory can often perform wonders, but tend to be expensive.
3 You could try to use a DIY recovery method by using software such as:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
and as this is GNU (general public licence) it's worth considering before trying a "paid for" option.
4 When recovering data, a USB connection is often not quite sufficient so it may be best to image the external hard drive and then re-image it back to a supplementary clear drive on your machine..... IDE/SATA ........be careful you don't re-image over anything important....... like your data partition or even your boot drive!
5 Trials of r-studio are available here:
http://www.r-studio.com/
and can often read/ files up to about 64Kb in size without charge, but for anything larger you will have to pay.
Good luck with this
Regards
paws