History first.
I am running Windows XP Professional 64 Bit. Remember that, for later. Many months ago, I bought an I/O Magic USB 2.0 External hard disk case which accepts IDE disks and thus you create a portable external drive. I did just that.
I tested this setup with a 6 Gig: partitioned and formatted fine, read/write was fine. I decided to make it a bit more useful - I removed the 6 Gig and put in my spare 120 Gig Maxtor.

I again partitioned as one big partition, and formatted this NEW drive, all was fine. I believe I selected FAT32 when I formatted the drive. Yes, I'm rather sure I selected FAT32: I'm not comfortable using NTFS with Linux and yes, I use the drive with Windows AND Linux. Windows XP64 cannot use the Windows EXT3 driver, I have contacted the guy that created the driver, he told me no worky. So knowing the EXT3 problem, I went for FAT32, which WinXP64 and Linux BOTH support VERY well. The 6 Gig drive had worked VERY well, so I stuck with FAT32. During formatting, NO ERROR dialogs were seen. Formatting completed after quite a long formatting session.... maybe 45 minutes to format the drive.

I knew my Windows XP 64 installation was dying. That is WHY I upgraded the external drive from 6 to 120 Gig. I needed about 12 Gig to save my XP64 files, so I could reformat the systems internal drive and start over. As I said, I did a test write to the external drive. I read back the file, compared the bytes, opened the file looked for errors; I also created folders and files inside the folders. I had NO problems with that external FAT32 formatted 120 Gig drive.

I dumped all of my files to the drive. I disconnected the external drive by powering down, since the external hard disk 'power and activity' LED was steady on, which indicates NOT busy. I did not use 'Safely Remove'.

I reinstalled Windows XP Pro 64 bit.
I got everything reconfigured in XP64, so I turned on the external disk drive.

The problem.
I get nothing.

The external drive won't mount. The 'power and activity' LED is cycling on and off, very slowly. 3 seconds on, 1 second off, repeat.
I've tried various file recovery tools. After HOURS of accessing the drive, the file recovery tools can find the DELETED (EXT3) files from a Linux distro I had installed on the disk, but nothing sees my more recent backup.
The system is VERY sluggish whenever the external drive is powered on. Opening 'My Computer' takes 10 minutes, I suspect the problem is the external drive is making life tough for Explorer (the filesystem explorer, not Internet Explorer).

The question.
What should I be doing to get this drive working and still save the files? File recovery software doesn't look to the tables so I do not get access to the files I wan (I did not delete the files I put on the drive).

I gave up on recovering the drive; I repartitioned and reformatted the drive.