External Hard Drive not accessible

Hi,

I am having difficulty accessing an external hard drive.

E:\ is not accessible
The request could not be preformed because of an I/O device error

I'm have tried plugging the external drive into two different computers with the same results. Both machines were running Windows XP SP3.

The external HD is is Western Digital 250 gb.

Things I have tried:

I tried using chkdsk to scan the disk, but the process wouldn't complete. I would just get a message to the effect that the drive is a FAT32, and it would stop there.

I also tried to burn an image of the drive with Acronis, but it gets a some "Failed to read sector errors" they start at sector 17,598, skip to 18,911 then are continuous unless I select Ignore All.

The entire message was:

Failed to read sector 17,598 of hard disk 2
Failed to read the snapshot manager volume (0x1000D0)
The request could not be preformed because of an I/O device error (0xFFF0)

I would get this exact message for each bad sector.

I can view the E drive in My Computer, but cannot access it.

I'm hoping someone has a suggestion about how I can gain access to this drive. I really need to recover the photos that are stored here. Most if not all other data is of little importance, but I need to find a way to save the photos.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you might offer.

subway

Subway, basically, these things are trying to tell you the drive is bad. There is physical damage to the hard drive. Everytime you plug it in you risk damaging more of your data. If there is ANY important data on this drive that you want you will need to visit a qualified repair center and have them perform the recovery. Suggesting anything otherwise would only put your data at more risk. A qualified repair center will use special tools and software to image the drive and perform advanced data recovery on a damaged file system.

appleoddity, Thanks for the reply. I was pretty much resigned to the fact that the drive was on it's last legs, just trying to salvage what I could. I was able to find a program called PC Inspector File Recovery ( www.pcinspector.de) that has enabled me to retrieve all my photos so far. I am in the process of getting any last remaining data off while I can. So at this point I am happy with what I have been able to save, anything else is a bonus. Thanks again for taking the time to answer my question. subway