external hard drive headache, please help!!

[rawsox]

hello, yesterday my pc decided to stop loading on xp, so knowing that i had an external hard drive (which at the time was working properly) i would re-install xp and sp2, i began to do this when it come up with the partitioning parts of the install for xp, i had my internal hard drive 400gb with xp installed (which was the corrupt version) then for some reason on my external i also had xp installed, which i thought was impossible to do??!!?? the reason i knew it was my external was the 4767876 or so mb it had on it beside the part it said that i had a partition on it (its a 500gb external samsung), so i decided to remove the both installed xp's (internal+external), now my pc works again with xp installed, but now my external will not connect via usb, Safely Remove hardware appears. so im stumped!!! it worked fine before why not now? have i been a lemon and maybe deleted everything from the external including the formatting???if thats possible, and have i lost all my files on the external? any help would be much appriciated!!!

[CCT]

You had a Primary partition OS on the external with a second partition and you over-wrote (formatted) the Primary partition which effectively disappeared the info about your second partition.

It is still there (unless you have been having more fun) so you could take it to a shop and explain what you did and hopefully they can either restore it or recover the data.

This will cost you - you must decide how valuable/irreplaceable the info is to you.

btw: Posting the same garbled info twice doesn't make it any clearer.

Next time please form sentences.

[rawsox]

Success!!!!! ive used a restore program and got what looks like all my files back,but they are in weird file name and extensions, and my jpg and bmp pics cannot be viewed. is there a way of making them viewable and usable again? ive burnt them from external to internal hdd. thanks

[geeksRus]

Success!!!!! ive used a restore program and got what looks like all my files back,but they are in weird file name and extensions, and my jpg and bmp pics cannot be viewed. is there a way of making them viewable and usable again? ive burnt them from external to internal hdd. thanks

try using Irfanview to open the image files...often it will offer to change the extension of image files it recognizes but which have weird extensions or none at all.