Hard Drive wont Open Unless I Format It

I have a 80 gig external Hard Drive with 1 corrupt file and a lot of other
good files in it. It was connected to a computer running XP. After upgrading
this same computer to Home Premium Vista,I am unable to OPEN this Hard Drive
unless I Format the whole drive? Vista is forcing a format on a H/D with
files on it that I need to keep??
I would be enormously grateful if there are Any Ideas on how I can retreive
my files, from this H/D??

Thank You....

John Mc Esq wrote:
> I have a 80 gig external Hard Drive with 1 corrupt file and a lot of other
> good files in it. It was connected to a computer running XP. After upgrading
> this same computer to Home Premium Vista,I am unable to OPEN this Hard Drive
> unless I Format the whole drive? Vista is forcing a format on a H/D with
> files on it that I need to keep??
> I would be enormously grateful if there are Any Ideas on how I can retreive
> my files, from this H/D??
>
> Thank You....

Connect the drive to a machine running XP and try to get your files. If
that doesn't work, then connect the drive and boot to a rescue system
like Knoppix or a Bart's PE to retrieve the files. If that doesn't work,
perhaps data recovery software will work. These are guesses because I
really don't know what error messages you're getting and what the "one
corrupt file" has done to make the drive unreadable to Vista.


Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User

I have the identical problem, with multiple external HDDs, all connected by
USB. I have confirmed that I can easily access the files via an XP machine,
so the drives are operational and fine. With 100 gig or so on one of these
drives, and about 40 on the other, I do not have the on-board HDD space (or
the inclination) to pull these files over. I even have this problem with a
manufacturer's PARTITION, which shows as Drive D. That partition is on the
same physical drive as my C drive, which obviously works fine.

"John Mc Esq" wrote:

> I have a 80 gig external Hard Drive with 1 corrupt file and a lot of other
> good files in it. It was connected to a computer running XP. After upgrading
> this same computer to Home Premium Vista,I am unable to OPEN this Hard Drive
> unless I Format the whole drive? Vista is forcing a format on a H/D with
> files on it that I need to keep??
> I would be enormously grateful if there are Any Ideas on how I can retreive
> my files, from this H/D??
>
> Thank You....