Help with data recovery for external hard drive

[Onagaleo]

I have an external hard drive that has important information on it. I was using it with a computer that ran Windows XP. That computer has crashed. I now have a computer that runs Windows 7. It is asking to format the EXTERNAL hard drive, but I do not want to do that because I will lose all my important information on the external hard drive. If anyone has any advice that they could share in helping to solve this problem, I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[LordConrad]

Try temporarily booting your computer with another OS using a Live CD (Ubuntu Linux works well). This might allow you to retrieve your data.

If the directory information on your external drive got corrupted, you may need to run a program that can rebuild it. I've heard such programs exist, but I can't recommend any as I've never needed to use one.

If you or someone you know has a copy of SpinRite, run it on your external drive. It may take a while to run, but I've seen it bring back drives that I thought were almost dead.