My system hung while I was playing iTunes. The iTunes library is on an external USB drive (IOGear ION 320GB Combo Hard Drive), which --after this crash-- my system will no longer read. It will not appear in My Computer or Windows Explorer, but DOES show up in Device Mangear, and System Information does yield this partial info: "Description Disk drive Manufacturer (Standard disk drives) Model WDC WD32 00JB-00KFA0 USB Device Bytes/Sector 512 Media Loaded No Media Type Fixed hard disk media Partitions Not Available SCSI Bus Not Available SCSI Logical Unit Not Available SCSI Port Not Available SCSI Target ID Not Available Sectors/Track 63 Size 298.09 GB (320,070,320,640 bytes) Total Cylinders 38,913 Total Sectors 625,137,345 Total Tracks 9,922,815 Tracks/Cylinder 255" The Volume info or somesuch appears to be damaged, but since it can't be read as a volume (with a drive letter), then how can I run chkdsk on it? The old scandisk had the "scandisk /all" command that would check all drives... how can I attempt to repair this drive? It does have a lot of back up data, and I'll take it to a data recovery specialist if I HAVE to.... I tried hooking the USB drive up to my old system (Dell Dimension 4300 S, w/ WinXP Pro, Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz), but it caused BODs every time it was plugged into it.

Take a careful look at connections. Any debris or loose solder in there? "but it caused BODs every time it was plugged into it." It's bad. Could be too much current draw. See event logs maybe for more clues. Might try a powered hub, they sometime support more current. They can also burn up the flash. Might look at linux or other OS's. They can sometimes mount the drive as a raw device and access it that way. Might even have to buy a similar product and remove change the chips. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10