USB Drive not recognized

[archangel]

Hello All,
I have a USB external HD that XP can't seem to see. It is a FAT32 drive. I can see it in the admin tools section and it shows up there with the proper size and description. This is the case when I plug it into any computer I have. I can plug other USB drives and sticks in and it can see them just fine. Any ideas?

Thanks!
 

[jamer123]

have you tried getting the right driver for it?

[patio]

Sounds like we're gonna need more details...

[archangel]

Thanks for the reply. Some things I've tried since my last post: I've taken the drive and placed it in a computer as a primary drive. The computer did not start windows and reported a fatal error. It has some kind of Compaq boot sequence jazz trying to start the system. The computer is NOT a Compaq.
I used an emergency boot disk to try to look at the drive. Running scandisk gave no report of errors. I did a surface scan as well. I used FDISK to look at the partition. It shows a partition as NON-DOS. Somehow in all of this I believe the MBR is corrupt because everything shows that data is there, you just can't get to it.
Pardon my rambling, this is what I've tried so far.

Thanks again!

[patio]

We need to know the history of this drive and what machine it may have came out of...
the way it's being reported isn't normal...
P.S. External drives are normally not bootable without a lot of wrestling so it's not the MBR...

[archangel]

Sorry for not being clear, this was originally in a older Compaq computer as the primary drive. It had Windows XP Pro loaded. Somewhere along the way everything went south. It was my Father-in-law's computer. I really don't know what he has done to contribute to this. I'm trying to recover the files in the My Documents folder for him. Everything else is unimportant. Hope this helps .... it has me scratching my head!

[steven32collins]

i kinda having the same problem except its a flash drive. when i plug it in it does nothing and if your luky it will pop up with a message saying this drive has malfunctiond its 4gb worth of memory and it has alot of files on it

[patio]

You do not need it to boot to Windows to get your data...
The reason it won't boot in another machine is it's looking for the machine it was installed on...this rarely works.

You need to install it as a slave on a working desktop with a burner...

[archangel]

I believe I have found the problem. There appears to be damage done to the partition and MBR. I have put the drive through a data recovery program and it is reporting a lot of corrupt data. Only few files are recoverable, unfortunately nothing I need. I don't know of anything else I can do here. Any more suggestions?

Thanks!