External drive issue

Hey all, thought I was getting better at this troubleshooting stuff but need some help if possible. I just upgraded to a new desktop for the wife. We went from XP on the old pc to Win 7 on the new. I did a file transfer cable old data to the new pc. The WD external 500g was disconnected at the time. After all was done I plugged in the external drive into the new pc and could see it but not access it, Win7 wanted to format the drive. Well after several attempts at that I thought I would just hook the exteranl back to the old pc and see if there was another menthod. It wont work there either now and don't understand what happened. I can see it but I get path invalid. I tried to change the drive letter and that did not help either. I went to disk management and looked to see what I could and it shows part of the disk no file system, active healthy 168mb. The other part is unallocated 465gb. I am unsure what to do at this point other than maybe get some recovery software as the contents are lots of pictures and I don't want to do anything stupid and lose them or die at the hands of a scorned wife :)

Thanks for looking and any help that may come

I am not an expert but I think that you should have said NO to the formatting request. My pc wants to format my memory card from the camera. I say No and then it shows me the files.

Another guess but I wonder if you had your disk set for a FAT file system and your new pc wanted to see an NFTS system. Formatting will most likely loose data but it should have warned you about that.

Not much help I know but these are my thoughts on your problem.


Mark

Try plugging it into a different USB port.

Thanks for the reply! I have actually tried all that is suggested including connecting it back to the old PC which is still in it's original state. It seems to me that the partition containing the NTFS or whatever was assigned by XP years ago has changed to nothing there but it still shows up as drive G: meaning there is no FAT or NTFS showing, so either it's gone or corrupt. I don't mind buying psome software to fix it but I don't want to spend money on programs that don't fix it. I think when I pulled the USB out while it was running did the damage. My bad!

You could try something like Recuva:

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Another option, especially if the drive is no longer under warranty, would be to remove it from the enclosure and connect it directly to your computer's motherboard, if possible.

Zero the drive then re-format?

OK...I have figured it out. I pulled the drive from the case, it is a WD MyBook, put it back into the native pc it was orginally connected to. I downloaded a free partition repair program ( I left a donation for using it) which is all text based called testdisk and it worked really good by restructuring the partition without destroying anything. I'm not sure if removing the drive from the casing did any good or not but it worked. THIS PROBLEM IS SOLVED! Thanks for the help and suggestions I received. If anyone needs any further info feel free to contact me.