After reinstalling windows XP my external 80g USB Hard Drive cannot be read.
I have saved nearly 50g of data that I dont want to lose.
So I dont want to format the drive again.
Any help about retrieval of the data or commands for the PC would be of great help.

Ian

The problem could be that re-installing XP created new user accounts, and
the files on the external disk are not visible because XP thinks that you do
not own them. Note that this could be a problem only if the external drive
is formatted as NTFS; FAT32 drives do not have such security. Log-in to XP
as an administrator and try to "take ownership" of the files as described in
this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;308421


"Ian" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news11B7F5E-EE02-48BC-B3CD-(E-Mail Removed)...
> After reinstalling windows XP my external 80g USB Hard Drive cannot be
read.
> I have saved nearly 50g of data that I dont want to lose.
> So I dont want to format the drive again.
> Any help about retrieval of the data or commands for the PC would be of
great help.
>
> Ian