Extrenal hard drive problems

[Guest]

I have an old Sony Vaio notebook that had been having problems, one of which
is it only has an 8 gig hard drive, so I bought an external hard drive and
had been using it for a few months. Problems with viruses convinced me to
dump all of my important files onto the external drive and then use the
system restore cds to completely wipe my computer and reinstall windows XP.
Now when i try to open this plug-and-play hard drive, it says the drive is
not formatted. I am a photography student and most of my work is saved on
this drive. How can I access it with out formatting?

 

[Uwe Sieber]

I have an old Sony Vaio notebook that had been having problems, one of which
is it only has an 8 gig hard drive, so I bought an external hard drive and
had been using it for a few months. Problems with viruses convinced me to
dump all of my important files onto the external drive and then use the
system restore cds to completely wipe my computer and reinstall windows XP.
Now when i try to open this plug-and-play hard drive, it says the drive is
not formatted. I am a photography student and most of my work is saved on
this drive. How can I access it with out formatting?

Try it on another computer first. If this fails, try to
grab your photos using a digital image recovery software
that scans for JPGs independent of the file system like
this:
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm


Uwe