External HDD crashes Vista

Hello, I have vista 64 bit home premium and my hard drive stopped working today when explorer.exe crashed while i transfered a file to the external HDD. Ever since, my computer labels it just 'Local Disk (E: )' instead of Buffalo Mass Storage Device, which it used to say. The files can still be accessed from my PS3 and can still be viewed. I checked the event logger and it said the HDD was "Healthy" and when i use the Safely Remove Hardware feature, it shows my Hard Drive as Buffalo External HDD Usb device. So my computer can find some info on my hard drive, but whenever i open 'My Computer' and click on the drive E:, explorer.exe immediately stops responding and restarts.

I've run Norton scans, restarted my computer and tried accessing the HDD from a Mac, all to no avail.

Thanks for any help!

Hi,,
Do you have much saved on that external hard drive?? if so formatting it is not the way to go..
On run tyep "mmc" then from file "add in snap" add disk management.. and see what details you see for the external hard drive from there..

cheers
ash

When I went to device manager and clicked Buffalo External HDD... i found a few details...

Disk: Disk 1
Type: Basic
Status: Online
Partition Style: Master Boot Record (MBR)
Capacity: 953869 mb
Unallocated Space: 1 mb
Reserved Space: 0 mb

When i went to MMC> disk management, i found this...

Layout: Simple
Type: Basic
Filetype: RAW
Status: Healthy (Primary Partition)

I also tried updating the driver and reinstalling the USB Mass storage driver. And i ran an elevated command prompt and used the 'chkdsk' feature to scan and repair bad blocks in my HDD. That scan finished but my problem persists. Even though the Microsoft Management Console>Disk Management labels my drive as RAW, the cmd prompt identified it differently...(I think as NTFS)

Should I try changing the drive letter?

EDIT: Lastly, when I try to access the drive and wait a while, it asks me to reformat the drive.

I just noticed that it also says my external has No fault tolerance, 100% free space, and 0% overhead in the Disk Management info

and ive got a lot of stuff on my hdd that i dont want to lose

run that program from your computer.. recover all the files save it to your computer temporarily.. formaat the hard drive and re transfer the data.. can't think of anything else.. as you had already tried chkdsk etc

Recuva - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com

cheers