External HD - Lost Data HELP!
 

I backed up my stuff to an external today, formatted, then went to grab my
stuff from the external... and nothing.

When I plug it in, a message pops up in the bottom corner about removable
hard disk or whatever, but when I go to My Computer, theres nothing there.

Its an 80gb Maxtor 5000le.

I thought it was perhaps because I was on Fat32 and the drive might have
been NTFS, but I converted to NTFS, and still sees nothing.

There isn't just pictures or whatever on the drive, well over 3 months of
work and 15 gigs of data will be lost if I don't get this back.

Please, someone help! ! ! :eek:

I guess you've tried rebooting, I had that happen once on a smaller scale, on a flash usb drive. I rebooted after it installed the initial drivers and it was back and running right.

Proceed carefully. Don't start running recovery software until you know what's going on.

You have XP or 2K?

Does Disk Management see it? If so, does it see empty space, foreign, what? Is it a basic or dynamic disk?

Wish I could recall all of this. Sort of had a similar probably last year. Windows has a limit on the number of devices (eisa?) that it can control. You go over that and, well you don't go over that. Do you have a flash drive plugged in? A couple of other hard drives connected? Its something like that. Wish I could be more precise.

I have had problems with my external (at times) if I plug it in to the computer too quickly after plugging in the power - basically says unrecognised USB device. I have just unplugged the usb cable then re-plugged in and it comes up.