Problem with my backup drive

[Nightshade X]

Hey, guys. I'm experiencing a problem with my external 1.5TB drive. Up until today, it was working fine. Now, it appears to be failing. There's nearly constant drive activity, according to the LED. Also, whenever it's plugged into my laptop, it drags the system to a crawl and affects the stability of whatever program comes into contact with the drive. Finally, when I was able to look at the drive in Disk Management (Windows 7 Home Premium x64), it saw the drive. However, the whole drive read as RAW.

Am I right about the drive failure? What can I do from this point? The thing I'm most concerned about is the data that's on the drive. Some files I have are only on that drive (I was working on a redundancy plan before this happened).

Thanks for your help, everyone.

[Mithrandir]

How is it formatted? Can you boot from a linux distro on a USB drive and try to copy the data from the failing drive?

[Nightshade X]

It was formatted as NTFS before.

[Mithrandir]

Hmm... You may be able to read it under linux if you wanted to boot off a thumb drive and copy over the data, but I'm not sure you'd be able to write to it. Without an optical drive, I'm kinda out of other options, I guess. Normally I'd say "put it in another computer and run spinrite on it."

[Bobtheduck]

Ubuntu 9.10 can write to NTFS. I access my various video, document, music, and picture files on it. If it's your main drive, you have to go through host, but if it's external, it will show up on your desktop when you plug it in. It will also give you a warning if it's about to die (did for mine, just got a new one)

[Mithrandir]

It can?!? Sweet! I wasn't aware that they resolved that (to be fair, it's been a very long time since I attempted to access an NTFS file system from linux...)