BleepingComputer.com: reformat external IDE drive but it was working internally

My son's desktop computer (xp pro) had a rootkit on it for an extended period of time (he now believes me about firewalls). The drive and computer were still working when I took the IDE hard drive out. I need to pull off football videos and pics (can you say, youtube is not a backup!) before we reformat the disk. I put the drive in an external enclosure (Azio 3.5" aluminum USB 2.0). We made sure it was jumper right for Master drive. My laptop (Vista) recognizes the drive (shows in My Computer), but says it needs to be reformatted! My desktop (xp pro) says the same thing. Why oh why??? It doesn't need to be reformatted... I have other externals that were internals and they didn't need to be reformatted first. What is going on? I hope someone can figure this out. I hope I don't have to reinstall this drive and find and install a burner in order to get my data off the drive. Please help. Thanks!

Jumper setting for the IDE drive? Does it match what the enclosure suggests?

Louis

Thanks for the help. Yes, it said to set it for master. I will take it out and verify. Could it be that the external might be formatted with fat32 (my son did this, so I'm not sure about it) and both the xp machine and vista are ntfs?

Thanks!

Neither XP nor Vista have problem with FAT file systems...it's the 9x O/Ses installed on FAT which cannot read NTFS. XP installs on either FAT or NTFS.

Louis

This post has been edited by hamluis: 01 June 2009 - 09:48 AM