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