ok, so I've posted in the past about a nearly identical problem, where my computer [laptop] stops recognizing the external harddrive. I bought a 300gig external, brand new to back up the stuff that was on the first external hdd, and then the new one, today, all of a sudden isn't working. When I say it isn't working, I mean that windows says it isn't formatted and do I want to format it. The old one quit showing up in windows, which makes recovery difficult. I have partition magic and some partition repair tools. I'm curious if I just reformat, will that solve these problems so that my pc won't just suddenly stop recognizing drives? PLEASE HELP!!! This is very frustrating as I'm a student and have all of my medical, tax, etc. records on these drives and need to recover the data as well as just have the **** machine work right. It was doing fine until today, and it has done almost the exact same thing in the past couple months which leads me to think that maybe it isn't the external drives, but maybe something with my laptop? Any thoughts, advice, etc. would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.