I recently purchased a external enclosure (ADS) with a 160gb Western Digital HD. After saving programs and files from my overloaded main HD in my compaq, I went ahead and uninstalled those programs and deleted those files off of my compaq. Now all of a sudden my external HD no longer shows up when I connect it to my compaq. I did some checking and found that the drive shows up in the device manager but is not listed under my computer. It used to show up as drive "E". Disk management shows the drive but says it is unallocated. I have since found that the files seem to still be on the drive but I don't know how to get to them. What can I do to get it to show up as drive "E" again? It is a powered enclosure that connects to my machine via USB. Thanks for any adivce you can offer.

Try your external HDD on another computer. If you see the same behavior, your external HDD may have become corrupt or defective. If that is the case, you might try slaving the HDD on the IDE chain.

I don't think I can slave it because my Compaq is a laptop. If it is corrupt can I still salvage any of the files?

I just dealt with this and with my HDD, I could access and salvage some files but not others.

how can I get what I can off of this drive? Is there an app for this type of situatiobn, for recovering or salvaging files?

Have you first tried rebooting the Laptop? Check the cable as it might have been bent. Try reading the drive from a friends PC through his/her IDE channel. <===Lefty=== AMD 64 3200+ 200 GB WD Geforce 5500FX 256 MB 512 MB Ram Needs more. Windows XP

You can get an inexpensive adapter (laptop to desktop) and connect the drive to a PC and extract your files. I see that problem of XP losing drives every once in a while. I've never come across a fix. I have seen a suggestion to try running 'fix mbr' from the Recovery Console.