Windows 7: external drive HELP need please

hi, i`m new here and i need some major help. i put a load of files/music/videos etc on my external drive as i was upgrading from xp pro to windows 7.
after installing windows 7 (a complete fresh install) i can`t get into my drive and it is asking me to format it to be able to use it. i know formating the drive will wipe everything on it and i really need to get the files back. i didn`t think upgrading windows could be such a pain in the a$$ regarding the drive.
the drive is a seagate expansion external drive 1TB.
any help to solve this would be totally epic

What is the status of the drive/partition in Disk Management. Does it say "RAW" ??

yes it`s showing as RAW

Hmm, many people had this problem. I have not seen a simple solution yet. Maybe a live Linux CD can deal with it and transfer the data over.

i`m giving icare data recovery disk a shot at the minute, gonna take about 20 minutes to finish the scan so i`ll report back when it`s done

If that does not work, try Recuva. But first I would try diskpart. Open an elevated command prompt ( click start, type cmd in the dearch box, right click on cmd and select run as administrator) In the box that comes up, type diskpart, press enter and in a few seconds the window will respond by saying diskpart. Type list disk and it will list all disks connected to your computer. type select disk # (where # is the number of the disk you are having issues with). press enter. it will respond with disk # is the selected disk. Type assign and press enter. If this works, it will assign it a drive letter. Type exit and press enter twice to close the window.In that case you can open it with explorer and look at the files inside.

Good tip essenbe - but it won't work if the OS only sees a RAW partition with no recognized filesystem... (in fact, assigning a drive letter will most likely throw up a prompt to format the new drive.)

It worked last time in the same situation with an XP drive. Maybe it will work this time.

Hmm, interesting. I see where you're going with this...the OS simply misidentifying the partition as "raw".
Learned something new.

Learning something happens every day to all of us on SF. But, seriously there have been quite a few problems with drives taken out of XP machines and windows wouldn't recognize it. I don't know why That solution worked that time, but but it does not work all the time. XP uses NTFS file system mostly but can use FAT. Windows can read either, so why is this problem happening?