Don't even think about that. Many many too many possibilities to investigate yet.

Highest on the list is Murphies Law!

Have you tried turning off your Lappy > disconnecting the External Drive > turning the Lappy back on > re-connecting the External Drive > then looking at its contents?

I do not know a great deal about windows7, however if you can acess HELP and Computer Management, you should be able to see the disk and any unformatted partitions.

With XP you also have the option to OPEN the drive to see contents.

There is possibly a better way to do this in W7 perhaps someone can advise.

You should also from Windows Explorer be able to go to the option to show all files and select show all hidden and system files, which will tell you where the space (if it exists) is.

Terry

If you are using for permanent documents, life time pictures/videos or anything that you have no backup in your desktop computer, I would prefer to use a hard drive over flash drive. flash drives don't have any specific life expectancy, so it can break/stop working any time without any reason. So there is more chance to lose your files by using flash drive.coffee mug