ok, so back in 2001 [or somewhere thereabouts] I got a desktop made by HP. Then in 2005, I upgraded to a laptop by Dell. When I did this, I saved the old HDD from the desktop and bought an external drive encasement so that I could use it for extra storage. The old HDD is a maxtor, Diamondmax 16 60GB ATA/133 HDD. It has worked for the past year and done fine, maybe a little slow at times, but still worked fine. so I store all of my medical, personal, photos, records etc. on it. It is partitioned I guess into two HD's a 5GB and a 55GB. I keep a lot of my very important data on this disk. Anyway, so I moved recently and plugged it in and it said "Error, disk is not formatted, would you like to format it now?" which i clicked on "NO" as it has very valiable info on it that i don't want to loose. I tried it on my girlfriends laptop as well and got the same results. How is it that it could have been working fine and then now it seems to have trouble being read and such that it thinks it needs to be formatted? I need to get to the data on these disks and can't afford to loose all of it by reformatting them. How should I go about fixing this? Any tips or suggestions are greatly greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.