External USB drive suddenly unallocated (XP)*Fixed*
 

I'd usually figure this out for myself but I've just had a death in the family and I'm not thinking so well. Lack of sleep does that...
My trusty BitTorrent machine has a 250GB external USB HDD with two partitions. I think that they were both primary.
After an involuntary reboot, it saw the entire drive as unallocated space under disk management. Plugging the drive into a spare machine gives me the same result.
My hunch is that the reboot interrupted the I/O to the disk and buggered the partition table
Does anyone know of a utility I can use to recover the partitons?
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions
BOFH

Ther were a couple of threads recently about disk problems that have links to useful tools here and here

SD

My condolences for your loss BOFH.

Conan

I think there's a standard ATA Hard drive with a standard ATA connector inside that USB external drive. Taking the drive to a desktop computer with a 2.5" to 3.5" ATA-adapter would be worth trying out. It could be just the USB-to/fro-ATA circuitry that's bad.

Thank you, Saab, but it looks a bit nastier than that.

Thank you Conan, for your condolences - they are appreciated.

The drive is a standard 3.5" in a USB enclosure, so I'll transfer it to my hotplug cage and put it straight into the bus - taking your lead, DBTL - thank you. Looks like Ranish or some hard core fiddling to fix it, though.

I used the ultimate boot cd (well worth having) to mount some utilities and it would seem that the MBR is stuffed.

Weird - work is a bu99er at the moment and I'm able to stay focussed there, but at home I've turned into a newb. ISTR I do have a utility somewhere which fixed a similar problem, but don't have the concentration to find it again. When I do, I shall post the resolution here.

BOFH

Dead HDD - Fix discovered
 

Here is one for your toolchest:

Get TestDisk here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Fixed my system in 15 minutes, no manual intervention, and all on USB!

Works on every desktop OS known to man. He is collecting Euro coins, do help him out (although posting a tenner, which is what I am doing, is less exspensive postage-wise).