Can't access external fat32 drive.

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Guest

I have an external hard drive in a USB enclosure. The drive was formatted as
FAT32 under 98SE. I used it for storing files after getting a new drive and
switching to XP on the main drive in my computer. I recently got a new PC
with Vista installed. I was able to access the usb drive twice with no
problem. This morning when I tried to open the drive in explorer I got a
message telling me the drive needed to be formatted before I could use it.
What gives? I noticed that the automatic defragmenting service had run on the
drive overnight since I did not know it was scheduled to do so. Would this
have corrupted the drive making it unreadable under Vista? I backed up all of
my important files top this drive from my old PC and was transferring them to
the new one as I got time. Now I can't get to anything on this drive. Help!
 
Ken H. said:
I have an external hard drive in a USB enclosure. The drive was
formatted as
FAT32 under 98SE. I used it for storing files after getting a new
drive and
switching to XP on the main drive in my computer. I recently got a new
PC
with Vista installed. I was able to access the usb drive twice with no
problem. This morning when I tried to open the drive in explorer I got
a
message telling me the drive needed to be formatted before I could use
it.
What gives? I noticed that the automatic defragmenting service had run
on the
drive overnight since I did not know it was scheduled to do so. Would
this
have corrupted the drive making it unreadable under Vista? I backed up
all of
my important files top this drive from my old PC and was transferring
them to
the new one as I got time. Now I can't get to anything on this drive.
Help!
Click to expand...


AFAIR automatic defrag by default do not run on external drives.

Probably you disconnected that disk without dismounting first and it has
corrupt bootsector now. You can rebuild bootsector from scratch or
restore it from spare copy with Testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/ .
Here are examples: http://www.cgsecurity.org/phpwiki/index.php/examples
..
 
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