Many thanks for the quick reply. My system is running XP and the computer does recognize the usb external drive that is NTFS. I want to state right up front that I ended up with the virus from hell, which deleted my restore points, disabled my keyboard and mouse at startup so I couldn't get into recovery mode, and also disabled task manager. I reinstalled XP from my CD, with the usb drive disconnected. I had to do a destructive re-install because this virus had even corrupted my recovery files for a repair instead of full destructive reinstall. The good news was that even though the C drive was formatted, Recuva found the pictures that were on it, and that is where the trouble started. After recovering them, I thought I'd move them to the external drive. I used Recuva to make a new folder. When I did that, it was strange that the new folder created had a + in front of it as shown in the Recuva directory. I even clicked on the plus to see if it would expand, but it did not. I then checked each picture I wanted, and said OK. They were moved over immediately to the new folder on the external drive. When I closed Recuva and looked on the external drive, only the Recuva created folder was on my external drive! I looked all through it, and thinking about the + sign in front of the folder (when I was in Recuva), I thought it must have made a sub folder with all the other directories. NO. Nothing else shows on the folders list. The external drive is a 500Gig drive, and shows that it is 2/3 full of data, but no folders are there.
Right now I'm running Recuva on the external drive and it has found over 47,000 files just with a "picture" search, so the data is there. Should I just use Recuva to get all the pics and move them to my 1 Terrabyte drive?
Many thanks for any ideas on this. My one big regret is that I did not look at my external drive BEFORE I created the folder. Maybe the virus had deleted all the folders off it??
Regards,
Courtney
