I am having trouble with a laptop not booting XP.

I have backups of this and another machine on a Western Digital 80GB external HD (the kind that plug into USB).

I ran abackup on Friday, but had a large file from Sunday I wanted to archive.

So I plugged in the USB drive, loaded UBCD4WIN... and it didn't "recognize" the external HD.

So I unplugged it and plugged it into a good machine... And THAT machine doesn't recognize it! It doesn't show up in Explorer, CMD, or anything! AND I've rebooted!!!!

I don't care what happened - how can I recover my backups???!?!????

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Now THIS can't be good:

Trying running testdisk on the USB drive and see what information it gives and whether it can see the original partition information.

I suspect that somehow your mbr has become corrupted and will need fixing.

Testdisk Datarecovery examples

GetData Back

If you can't get any data recovered this program is very good however I'm afraid it cost's $79 for the NTFS version, but you can run the trial version to see if it will recover the data.

The UBCD4Win won't have caused your usb drive to become corrupted.

If you do recover the partition information run chkdsk, however I'd recommend getting all the data off and reformatting the drive.

I had a simular issue last year with my WD 180gb external usb2 drive. In my case it was caused by leaving the drive plugined in while installing SP2, that was a mistake on my part, but looked identical to what you are reporting now.



Be very carefull that no program writes any data to the drive if you are trying to recover files from it.

Testdisk is a good place to start, but recover the files to another drive so that the data on the USB drive is not altered in case you need to try other options.