Greetings all!

My external hard drive recently took a bad knock (that is, I dropped it!). Now upon powering up it is making all sorts of wonderful buzzing noises. After some time it is visible in Windows explorer, however my problem is that in my wisdom, I compressed a couple of folders (the most important one included) that will not open up to be explored. These folders, now showing as blue after their compression in XP, are trying to format the drive when I try and open them, which I would prefer not to do. If anyone has any ideas or can recommend software that may help with the recovery it would be highly appreciated.

Regards

Hi and welcome to PC Help Forum

I think that you'll need to un-compress those files before you try to access them.

To decompress a folder:

First right click on the compressed folder you want to decompress. Then left click on Properties. Then click on the Advanced button. You’ll see a small box next to the text “compress contents to save disk space.” If the box is empty then the folder is already decompressed. If the box has a checkmark in it, then click on it and the checkmark will disappear, leaving the box empty. Then click on OK. Then click on Apply. You may be asked whether you want to decompress the contents of the folder only, or the contents of the folder and all subfolders and files. The choice is yours. Chose to decompress the contents of the folder and all subfolders and files for maximum decompression, which will decompress the most files allowing you to access them slightly faster. Or chose to decompress only the folder and its files, not subfolders and their files, in order to keep the subfolders compressed and save disk space. Decompressing the contents of the folder could take several seconds or several hours. It all depends on how much stuff is in the folder. When decompression is done, click on OK. The folder and its files will now have filenames in black instead of blue. This indicates that they are decompressed.