I've got an external hard drive, with around 20GB worth of data on. About 2GB of which is important enough for me to take the taking trying to extract it.

I've tried running data recovery progress, file recovery, and chkdsk; none of which have worked. All either not finding the file, and stopping part way through.

Problem with the drive, is that sometimes the laptop picks it up, sometimes it doesn't, but even when it does it says it can't find the files when you try and open/move them.

Any suggestions on what I could try and do so I can get this data off, then I can format and start afresh by making new partitions.

It's FAT32.

I'm using XP.

Anything else i'm not telling you, then shout.

Any help i smuch appreciated because i'm starting to get desperate.