DARN!

will look again at my Acronis and any other options in the morning but is sounding more and more like the disk itself is bad
- That's why the USB message for the device but none for the logical volume
- Why the physical disk appears in Disk Management but there's no logical volume displayed in Explorer

And Acronis not reporting anything isn't a good sign either.

You have any other enclosure or computer with which to test that disk? You might have to rely on data recovery software to get what you can if, as it's appearing, it's the disk itself. Never used them so can't recommend there tho.

/************ EDIT ************/
I just looked back in the thread and didn;t see it mentioned.. Out of curiousity, what file system was on the disk? What operating system was on the machine it came from?

But looking back again, i didn't notice if you ever did uninstall the USB drivers for all the controllers? and then reinstall? or what have you done wrt driver uninstall/reinstalls/

Sorry i havent replied to this in a couple of weeks i went to Phuket in Thailand, it was BEAUTIFUL!!!!! highly recommend it!!

Anyhow, with a fresh mind i ran the Acronis without plugging in the drives (obviously it did not find the external drive).
i then plugged in the External drive opened Acronis again, and had exactly the same result...... So Acronis is not picking up the External drive....

Im not sure what the file system was, the disk came from a Dell inspiron 640m running windows XP Pro.

i did disable the controllers and uninstall all the USB drivers then re-installed