Hello all,

Here is my situation: I have an external Maxtor one touch 200 gig hard drive that I connect to my work laptop. I plugged in my external hard drive via USB cable and booted up my laptop. I hadn't realized that I left my hard drive on. I received a Windows XP screen that appeared to be analyzing my drive, when I saw the line of text about writing or failing to find I boot sector I immediately cut power to the external hard drive. Now every time I load Windows my F: drive appears(external hard drive) but when I try to access data, it says the drive is not functional or inaccessible.

Below are my specs of my machine:

System: Microsoft Windows XP
Professional
Version2002
Service Pack 2

Processor: 2.00ghz
1.00 GB of Ram.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Louis

Are you trying to boot off of the external hard drive?

I was not, but since I had it turned on while I was booting my laptop I think Windows thought I was....I have no operating system installed on my external.

Just change the boot sequence in the laptop bios so it does IDE-0 or hard drive first, then Optical or cd-rom drive second or else every time you start your computer with the usb drive attached, the computer will look to boot off of it.

Thanks for the info. I will do this. But as far as the data is concerned have I lost that for good then?

You should be able to access the info once Windows has started, through windows explorer. Hopefully... It hasn't been formatted or anything, has it?

This is what I see inside explorer....

Any suggestions anyone?