External Hard Drive problem -- reads as local drive

I've had a usb 2.0 external hard drive (80gb) for a while now, and just today, when i turned on the driver to make use of it, nothing happened. (Usually, Windows XP will start to automatically load the driver and I'll see as it cycles all my files in the drive in the top left corner of my screen.) So nothing happened. I checked out My Computer, and it displayed the external drive, but the contents show nothing. Under its detail, it lists the drive as a local drive also. I have already uninstalled the driver from the device manager and reinstalled, and even fooled around with the install files on the cd-rom that the external drive came with. Is there any other help, please? Or do I have to resort to formatting the drive, or partitioning, or whatever... I have no clue, but I would really like to keep all the files I have saved on the drive. Thanks a lot for all ya'll's time.

Welcome to Windrivers clarkross

try this free file recovery see what it makes of the files on your usb drive.

You could also try booting to safe mode with the usb drive already on and see what happens there.

Thanks a lot for the quick reply.

Unfortunately, I tried the PC Inspector File Recovery program, but to no avail. When I would click on the option "Scan for drives," it would begin reading through my computer, and it would finish reading my main hard drive, the C: drive, and it would continue on and give me an error
message for my external hard drive saying:

"error no. 2
drv:129 LBA:0 blocks:1

Abort, Retry, or Ignore?"

I don't know if that's any help for you, but that's what I get. When I hit retry, it gives me the same message, and when I hit ignore, it stops the scan and shows me a table with all my drives. It has fixed disk #'s 1 (for my C: drive) & 2 (for my external hard drive). Beside fixed disk #2 and my external hard drive, labeled drive E:, it just shows 0.00 mb. So, I don't believe that the program was of any help.


I also tried safe mode, with the external hard drive on. However, just recently, the computer is unable to even read the drive without me having to turn it off, and then back on again to sort of allow the drive to send signals via the USB drive back to the computer. So I had to turn it off, and on again, and well... nothing really happened. I have the same problem.


Unfortunately, I don't think this is looking to good. :( However, again, I do appreciate all of your help.


Oh also! I have tried using the command prompt to do a chkdsk on the external hard drive, yet it gives me this error message, "Cannot open volume for direct access."

Can you use the usb drive on another computer?

I tried that, same problem.