Ah! external 120gig shows no data!

[tLove]

I know I haven't posted on these forums in awhile... but I'm in a bit of a pinch here.
I brought my external (120gig western digital) home from college to work on a few things back here on my home PC. I went to bed last night with the HD plugged in and everything seemed to be working fine.

I get up this morning, and windows gives me two weird errors about "not finishing writing data to x:/". I shrugged it off, but when I double click my external... nothing is there! It shows one folder (Apps) and theres nothing in it. So its showing nothing on my 120gig drive... and the drive only had 6% of space on it left. All my music, videos, pictures, projects, apps... etc... gone.

Now, I know the data HAS to be on there, its just a matter of getting it off and back on, right? I already unplugged the drive... the question is, where do I go from here? I'm on dial-up at home, so chances of me downloading software are slim & none right now. Once I get back to college I'll be able to download things.

GAH! Freaking out right now.... help!

 

[Murdochs_mad]

Recently had much the same poroblem, managed to recover most my data with a program called 'file scavenger' ver 3 and I fried my drive

 

[MVC]

Before you try to "recover" your data, try unplugging the drive (USB I assume), restarting Windows twice (yes twice), and then plugging the external back in. I've had XP Pro SP2 get "stuck" on hard drives using a USB connection several times. So, the idea is to get it to get itself "unstuck" so it will correctly access the drive again.

If you can get it to access the drive, it would be a very good idea to immediately backup your data just in case the drive itself really is failing

Good luck,
Mark

 

[Trap05]

Agree fully