[j323mo]

My old computer died a couple of days ago- I've got most of my work from there saved on disc but hadn't backed up anything recently and I would really love to salvage some of my stuff (ie. pictures, portfolio, archived emails)

So I pulled out the harddrive (yes, safely with a anti-static wrist strap), placed it into an External Hard Drive Enclosure plugged that into my newer computer.

It installed successfully.
In the COMPUTER folder, I can see the external drive labeled as FACTORY_IMAGE (D:) with 8.83 GB of data on it (which i am assuming is accurate to what I should have on there).

When I click on that it gives me D:/ RECOVERY, but I go into that and it shows me this:
"Recovery Partition
Warning!
This area of your hard drive
or partition) contains files used
for your PC Recovery.
Do not delete or alter these files.
Any change to this partition could
prevent any recovery later."

How do I access my files?
Was my hard drive damaged in the death of my computer? The device manager says that my external hard drive is working properly.
Will it make a difference that my old computer was Windows XP and my new Computer is Windows Vista?
Im thinking I'm missing something- any suggestions or directions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance,

J

[Carbon]

That is the recovery partition of the drive, not your files.

[j323mo]

...then how would i get to my files in the external harddrive?

or actually why doesnt that external hard drive show up? i double checked to make sure everything is connected properly...

what am i missing?

[Carbon]

You may be able to get at it by looking at it with a partition utility such as PartitionMagic, but if it's not showing up at all the data is probably lost.