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Message: [QUOTE="Woody, post: 14028874"] My apologies if this is a regular question or has been asked before but with over 314K messages on this group it may take me a long time to find it. My laptop only has a 60Gb internal drive (running XP SP2) so I use a USB 160Gb external HDD purely for data storage - it is not bootable. Yesterday it worked perfectly. I gave it to my son to download a file (he is running Windows 7) and he reckons it took over an hour for the disc to be recognised but he could not read it. If I now plug it into my machine it sits there for a minute or so then a 'disc not formatted' message appears centre screen. Would I be correct in guessing this is a corrupted MBR and if so can I use the Recovery Console to put it right? Do I use fixmbr or fixboot and can I steer it (i.e. fixbbot j:) to the HDD in question? If not what do I do? There is about 95Gb of data on it of which I need to recover about half. In the past I have used a Linux live cd to recover files from a crashed Windows hard disc (I used Knoppix) but will that work with NTFS? I do have another external HDD that I can use to copy to and then back again if necessary. I would be grateful for any help, else I see an expensive data recovery bill coming up! TIA [/QUOTE]