Hard disk failure. Help!

You should be able to readily tell what partitions are on the drive in the Disk Management tool. You may as well as plan a data recovery option to save the files from the drive and reformat it to NTFS where you will no longer run into this type problem. You may as well plan that rather then lose your shirt when the drive ends up needing to reformatted anyways.

WD and other companies make the recommendation for Windows users to reformat to NTFS if they won't be going back and forth with Mac which the software is compatible with as well as Windows. Once reformatted or a new partition is on and you go to plug the drive while booted in Windows whether on XP, Vista, or 7 the new hardware found and drivers are now being installed messages will be seen.

XP automatically sees the auto play prompting there while still seeing a new drive letter added. Each time you may see a different drve letter however.

"Deleted or lost files can usually be recovered from failed or formatted drives and partitions, CD-ROMs and memory cards using the free/libre software available in the Ubuntu repositories. The data is recoverable because the information is not immediately removed from the disk. Follow these steps to recover lost data. This guides applies to Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10 and 8.04." 8.10, 9.04 can also be added as well as a live Knoppix dvd. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

Like I suggested before you can copy and paste files and entire folders from any MS drive even the external one you have there while booted in a live distro like ubuntu. Knoppix is also user friendly for this as well as several even free data recovery programs. You can install a live ubuntu distro to a usb flash drive and boot from that as well to see your files copied over to a temp folder(s) until you can reformat or convert the exiting partition to NTFS. Use Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows Computer :: the How-To Geek

The MS article for seeing Fat16 or 32 converted to NTFS can be seen at How to convert a FAT16 volume or a FAT32 volume to an NTFS file system in Windows XP

For a good review on data recovery programs in general, Data Recovery Review – the best data recovery software reviews. Free data recovery software download!

You have a good seletion of options to consider besides the Acronis program there. The preference is simply booting up in a live distro for ready access to rather troublesome partitions ordinarily unavailable in Windows for copy+paste since the live cd will provide excellent access to all drives.

YupYup said:

Have you tried just a quick scan? and was the boot sector OK?. As for your screenshot i would interpret that as you would need to delete the other invalid partitions not RJ's Megadisk.

The boot sector on the internal drive has nothing to do with not being able to access an external usb hard drive. For some reason the WD installer isn't coming up as it should when the drive is first detected on any fresh installation of Windows.

This was another reason for suggesting the use of a live distro after downloading the replacement software and unpacking the zip file's contents first and then copyng those over to the usb drive while booted live. That includes the autorun.inf which may have been deleted somehow of the drive itself.

That's one good thing for the other guy's OS there when you run into a real headache. Once you have everything backed up get rid of that factory Fat crap and put a good ole reliable NTFS partition on yourself!